Commissioning Director, EMEA (UK or Norway)

Commissioning Director, EMEA (UK or Norway)

London; Norway

Reports To: Senior Director of Commissioning EMEA

Location: London/UK with extensive travel to EMEA portfolio (Norway, Finland, Portugal etc)

Position Type: Permanent, full time

About Nscale

Nscale is the GPU cloud engineered for AI. We provide cost-effective, high-performance infrastructure for AI start-ups and large enterprise customers. Nscale enables AI-focused companies to achieve superior results by reducing the complexity of AI development. Our GPU cloud bolsters technical capabilities and directly supports strategic business outcomes, including cost management, rapid innovation, and environmental responsibility.

We thrive on a culture of relentless innovation, ownership, and accountability, where every team member takes pride in their work and drives it with excellence and urgency. As an Nscaler, you’ll build trust through openness and transparency, where everyone is inspired to do their best work. If you join our team, you’ll be contributing to building the technology that powers the future.

About the Role (Job Purpose)

Commissioning is the last gate between capital spent and capacity earning. On contracted AI campuses it is a contractual event with dates, evidence requirements and remedies attached — not an internal quality exercise.

As a Director of Commissioning you own that gate. You will set the single standard by which every megawatt Nscale builds is proven, hold the authority to accept or refuse capacity on the company’s behalf, and build a commissioning and operational readiness function that scales from a 20MW first phase to multi-gigawatt campuses without the standard slipping as volume rises.

This is a build role. The function does not yet exist in its target form — the standard, the tooling, the team and the operating model are all to be created. Our portfolio spans Norway, the UK, Finland and the United States, and the technical scope is harder than conventional colocation: closed-loop direct-to-chip liquid cooling at high rack densities, Arctic and extreme-ambient operation, high-voltage grid interfaces, on-site generation and storage, and heat-reuse obligations.

What You’ll be Doing (Responsibilities)

• Author and own the Group Commissioning Execution Standard — the L0–L6 framework, test scripts, witness and evidence rules, defect taxonomy and turnover package specification — and make sure it is applied, not just published.
• Hold the acceptance gate: no system is energised, accepted or handed over anywhere in the group without your sign-off, and you hold that position under schedule and commercial pressure.
• Select, deploy and govern a single commissioning management platform so evidence, defects and progress are visible in one place across the portfolio.
• Make sure commissioning is built into every project master programme from the outset, and give early, evidence-based warning when energisation or acceptance dates are at risk.
• Work with Procurement, Legal and Delivery so acceptance criteria, witness rights, test obligations and turnover standards are written into EPC and OEM packages before they are let.
• Own the methodology for closed-loop direct-to-chip liquid cooling — CDU factory testing, secondary-loop flushing and passivation, water chemistry, per-rack flow balancing, leak detection, failover under thermal transient.
• Own high-consequence electrical testing: HV energisation sequencing with network operators, protection coordination and primary injection, black-building and utility-failure testing at full simulated load.
• Recruit, develop and retain a scarce, internationally mobile discipline — including in locations where the local specialist market is thin — and build succession so no hall depends on one individual.
• Own operational readiness and the