Job Description:
RMI is an independent, nonpartisan nonprofit working to transform global energy systems and align markets with a clean, resilient, and prosperous future. We partner with businesses, financial institutions, policymakers, and communities to accelerate solutions that unlock the energy transition at scale.
Position Overview
RMI is seeking a Principal, Power Systems & Data Centers to build and lead RMI’s cross-program strategy and advisory work focused on the rapidly growing data center sector.
The growth of AI and digital infrastructure is creating significant challenges and opportunities across electricity systems, generation and transmission, buildings, industrial materials, water, backup power, site selection, permitting, finance, and community engagement. Addressing these issues requires expertise that spans traditional organizational and sector boundaries.
RMI has deep capabilities across many of these areas, distributed across its Electricity, Buildings, Industries, Intelligence, Climate Finance, Third Derivative, US Program, and other sector and geography teams. The Principal will serve as an integrating leader across these capabilities — establishing RMI’s institutional theory of change for data centers, translating that strategy into differentiated market offerings, developing relationships and opportunities with priority external partners and clients, and leading complex cross-program engagements.
The position will sit within RMI’s Impact Consulting - Delivery Excellence Team and work horizontally across the Institute.
The successful candidate will combine meaningful data center industry expertise with strong strategic judgment, commercial orientation, consulting and delivery capabilities, and the ability to influence and mobilize teams across organizational boundaries.
Application Deadline: Sunday, October 4th at 11:59pm U.S. Central Time
Key Responsibilities
Strategy & Thought Leadership
- Develop and maintain RMI’s institutional theory of change for data centers, defining how rapid digital infrastructure growth affects the energy transition and where RMI can have the greatest impact.
- Identify the most important system-level barriers, leverage points, and interventions needed to align data center growth with clean energy deployment, grid reliability, affordability, decarbonization, and community outcomes.
- Establish a clear view of where RMI should play based on its technical expertise, market influence, analytical capabilities, convening power, and external relationships.
- Integrate perspectives from Electricity, Buildings, Industries, Intelligence, Climate Finance, Third Derivative, Transportation, policy, and other relevant teams into a coherent RMI data center strategy.
- Identify priority stakeholders whose decisions RMI should seek to influence, including hyperscalers, colocation providers, developers, utilities, regulators, policymakers, investors, and communities.
- Define strategic and reputational guardrails for RMI’s data center work, including where RMI should — and should not — pursue commercial engagements.
- Monitor changing technology, market, policy, infrastructure, and investment conditions and adapt RMI’s strategy accordingly.
- Represent RMI as a senior thought leader on the intersection of data center growth, energy infrastructure, and the clean energy transition.
Market Development & External Engagement
- Develop and execute RMI’s data center go-to-market strategy, translating the institutional theory of change into a focused set of commercial and partnership opportunities.
- Define priority client segments, buyers, pain points, and decisions where RMI has a differentiated right to win.
- Develop and market-test a portfolio of commercial offering hypotheses with external stakeholders and prospective clients.
- Identify and cultivate relationships with hyperscalers, colocation providers, developers, utilities, infrastructure investors, technology providers, and other priority stakeholders.
- Conduct senior-level market and client conversations to understand emerging needs and translate those needs into actionable opportunities for RMI.
- Partner closely with RMI’s Corporate Engagement team and program leaders to develop priority account strategies and a qualified pipeline of opportunities.
- Shape concept notes, proposals, scopes of work, staffing plans, delivery approaches, and commercial models.
- Apply disciplined go/no-go and right-to-win criteria to prospective engagements.
- Support senior client discussions and negotiations through contract execution.
Potential commercial offering areas may include:
- Power availability, procurement, and grid integration
- Flexible load and demand-side solutions
- Site selection and energy infrastructure strategy
- Clean firm power and backup generation
- Transmission and interconnection constraints
- Data center energy and emissions strategy
- Water use and cooling
- Low-carbon cement, steel, and construction materials
- Integration of Carbon Dioxide Removals (CDR) on site or adjacent to data centers
- Sustainability standards and metric design for data centers
- Permitting, policy, and community considerations
- Data center financing and investment
- Cross-sector decarbonization strategies for hyperscalers and operators
The Principal will not be expected to personally possess deep technical expertise in every area. A core requirement of the role is the ability to identify, mobilize, and integrate RMI’s subject-matter expertise into coherent strategies and client solutions.
Program Leadership & Delivery
- Serve as the accountable engagement leader for large, strategically important data center projects spanning multiple RMI programs and capabilities.
- Translate complex and ambiguous client questions into structured workstreams, hypotheses, analytical approaches, and decision-oriented outputs.
- Assemble and lead multidisciplinary teams drawing on expertise from across RMI.
- Define clear roles, responsibilities, and decision rights between the central Impact Consulting team and program-based subject-matter experts.
- Maintain accountability for project scope, timeline, budget, quality, and client expectations.
- Synthesize technical inputs from multiple disciplines into clear, integrated, executive-level recommendations.
- Guide the production of rigorous, decision-grade presentations, reports, analyses, and other client deliverables.
- Lead executive client meetings, workshops, working sessions, and presentations.
- Identify project risks early and take corrective action before issues become client escalations.
- Identify and shape follow-on opportunities where additional work creates genuine mission and client value.
- Ensure lessons from delivery inform subsequent offerings, scopes, pricing, methodologies, and strategic priorities.
Cross-Program Integration & Organizational Contribution
- Create the connective tissue required for RMI to operate as an integrated data center platform rather than a collection of independent technical teams.
- Build strong relationships with relevant Principals, Senior Principals, Managing Directors, and subject-matter experts across the Institute.
- Develop and maintain a clear view of RMI’s relevant capabilities, experts, analytical assets, datasets, relationships, and existing data center work.
- Identify capability gaps that may require new analysis, external expertise, partnerships, data, or investment.
- Develop repeatable approaches for staffing and governing multidisciplinary data center engagements.
- Identify methodologies, analytical modules, frameworks, datasets, and deliverables that can be reused across clients and engagements.
- Convert recurring client needs into repeatable advisory offerings where appropriate.
- Capture and institutionalize knowledge from client engagements and external market interactions.
- Mentor and coach RMI staff working on data center and Impact Consulting engagements.
- Contribute to RMI’s broader leadership community and the continued development of the Institute’s Impact Consulting capabilities.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of relevant professional experience, with substantial experience in data centers, digital infrastructure, energy infrastructure, or a closely related sector.
- Demonstrated understanding of the data center ecosystem and meaningful experience with several of the following:
- Hyperscale or colocation development
- Power availability and procurement
- Utility engagement and interconnection
- Site selection
- Data center design and construction
- Sustainability and decarbonization
- Permitting and regulatory issues
- Water and cooling
- Backup generation
- Infrastructure investment
- Proven experience developing and executing strategy in an ambiguous, rapidly evolving market.
- Experience leading complex, senior-client-facing consulting, advisory, or strategic engagements.
- Demonstrated ability to structure ambiguous problems, develop hypotheses, synthesize complex analysis, and translate technical information into actionable executive recommendations.
- Experience developing new offerings, shaping client opportunities, and contributing to business development, proposals, or commercial pursuits.
- Strong project and team leadership skills, including experience managing multidisciplinary workstreams, timelines, budgets, scope, and stakeholder expectations.
- Demonstrated ability to personally develop and shape high-quality analytical and client-facing deliverables.
- Ability to influence senior decision-makers and mobilize teams without direct reporting authority.
- Excellent written, verbal, presentation, and facilitation skills.
- Ability to bridge technical expertise and senior-level business decision-making across diverse stakeholders.
Preferred Qualifications
- 15+ years of professional experience with increasing strategic, commercial, and operational responsibility.
- Graduate degree in engineering, business, economics, public policy, energy, sustainability, or a related field.
- Direct experience working for or advising hyperscalers, colocation providers, data center developers, utilities serving large-load customers, or digital infrastructure investors.
- Experience in strategy or management consulting focused on data centers, energy, infrastructure, technology, or sustainability.
- Experience with data center development, site selection, energy procurement, infrastructure strategy, or investment.
- Demonstrated success building new market offerings or business lines.
- Strong existing network across the data center, energy, utility, technology, or infrastructure ecosystem.
- Experience leading large, multidisciplinary initiatives involving stakeholders across multiple organizations or sectors.
- Combination of industry operating experience and consulting/advisory experience.
Why This Role Matters
The rapid expansion of data centers represents both a major challenge and a significant opportunity for the clean energy transition.
Decisions being made today about where and how data centers are built, powered, financed, and operated will influence electricity infrastructure, capital deployment, industrial demand, community outcomes, and emissions trajectories for decades.
Few organizations have RMI’s combination of energy-system expertise, technical depth, market relationships, analytical capabilities, and convening power. At the same time, these capabilities are distributed across the Institute.
This role will be responsible for bringing those capabilities together — establishing a coherent RMI strategy for data centers, identifying where RMI can create differentiated impact, translating that strategy into concrete market interventions and client offerings, and ensuring that RMI can execute complex cross-program work at a consistently high standard.
Visa Sponsorship
Please note: At this time, RMI is not able to sponsor employment visas or hire candidates who require visa sponsorship to work in the United States. All candidates must have current, independent authorization to work in the U.S. without present or future sponsorship from RMI. We will update our hiring pages if this status changes.
Location
We are a remote-ready company with team members around the globe. Our beautiful and welcoming offices are available for meetings or focused work, whether you are traveling through or living nearby. Our U.S. offices are in New York City; Washington DC; Oakland, California; Boulder, Colorado, and Basalt, Colorado. This role can be located from anywhere in the continental United States.
We provide you with the essential IT equipment plus a one-time home technology payment and a monthly work from home/commuter allowance to ensure you have a comfortable home office set up and necessary supplies.
We love seeing each other in person! We occasionally gather for shared time together like retreats and learning experiences. Be ready to travel for occasional in-person meetings (and of course, we cover travel costs). Some roles may require more travel, which will be discussed during the hiring process.
Compensation
At RMI, we prioritize fairness in our pay practices. Salaries are determined based on a mix of experience, market benchmarks, and internal equity across similar roles. The salary range of this position is $139,823-$172,332. New hires typically start toward the lower end of the range, depending on experience and alignment with the role’s scope. In addition to base salary, this position includes an annual bonus target of 20% and eligibility for merit-based increases, which are tied to both individual and organizational performance.
Benefits
RMI offers a comprehensive benefits package for eligible employees, including:
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance
- 403(b) retirement match with immediate vesting
- Group life, AD&D, and short- and long-term disability coverage
- Health savings or flexible spending accounts
- Fertility and hormonal health support
- Mental health and wellness support
- Comprehensive leaves of absence, including parental leave
- Generous paid time off and sick leave
- Regional and organization-wide holidays
- Work-from-home and home technology allowances
- Learning and development opportunities
- Potential for bonuses and merit increases
- Remote and hybrid work options
- Team gatherings and regional meetups
- Rewards and recognition programs
Diversity
We know that the diversity of our teams makes us stronger as an organization, and RMI is dedicated to the principles of equal employment opportunity as outlined in U.S. federal law. We prohibit discrimination against applicants, interns, and employees on the basis of any legally recognized basis, including but not limited to: age (40 and over), race, color, sex, pregnancy (including lactation, childbirth, or related medical conditions), religion, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information (including testing and characteristics), sexual orientation, gender expression/identity, uniformed service member status, veteran status, citizenship status, or any other applicable status protected by applicable law.
RMI is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.
