Power Generation Operations Manager
Location: Spartanburg, SC
Employment Type: Direct Hire
Work Arrangement: Fully On-Site
Overview
We are seeking an experienced Power Generation Operations Manager to provide owner-side leadership and operational governance for a natural-gas-fired generation facility supporting a mission-critical, high-performance computing environment.
Day-to-day plant operations and maintenance are performed by a third-party O&M provider. This role serves as the senior internal authority responsible for overseeing that partnership, establishing operating expectations, managing risk, driving safety and reliability, and ensuring plant performance aligns with critical infrastructure uptime requirements.
The ideal candidate brings deep power-generation experience, strong knowledge of natural-gas-fired generation, and a proven ability to oversee outsourced plant operations in highly available or mission-critical environments.
Key Responsibilities
- Serve as the owner-side authority for power-generation operations and outsourced O&M execution.
- Provide strategic direction, operational oversight, and performance governance to the third-party O&M provider.
- Establish clear operating expectations, responsibilities, escalation procedures, and performance standards.
- Review and approve staffing plans, training programs, maintenance strategies, outage plans, and major operating procedures.
- Lead or participate in regular operational and performance reviews with the O&M provider.
- Drive a strong safety and risk-management culture across plant operations.
- Oversee HAZID, HAZOP, Job Safety Analysis, Management of Change, LOTO, arc-flash, confined-space, and gas-safety programs.
- Ensure operational risks are reflected in SOPs, MOPs, EOPs, and other plant procedures.
- Participate in incident investigations, near-miss reviews, root-cause analysis, and corrective-action tracking.
- Monitor plant availability, capacity, forced outages, maintenance compliance, safety performance, start times, and ramp-rate commitments.
- Provide technical and operational concurrence for decisions that could affect facility uptime, redundancy, or power availability.
- Coordinate generation operations with electrical distribution, UPS, BESS, load-shedding, and other critical power systems.
- Support integrated commissioning, black-start testing, island-mode operations, emergency procedures, and contingency simulations.
- Partner with engineering, infrastructure, operations, utilities, and external service providers to maintain reliable power delivery.
- Ensure compliance with applicable environmental, regulatory, permitting, emissions, and fuel-handling requirements.
- Support regulatory inspections, audits, compliance documentation, and corrective-action plans.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical, Electrical, Chemical Engineering, or equivalent relevant experience.
- 10+ years of power-generation experience with significant exposure to natural-gas-fired generation.
- Experience overseeing or governing outsourced power-plant O&M providers.
- Strong working knowledge of gas turbines and/or reciprocating engines.
- Experience with balance-of-plant systems, protection systems, controls, and plant automation.
- Demonstrated leadership in operational safety, risk management, HAZID, and incident prevention.
- Experience supporting mission-critical, high-availability, or data-center-integrated power environments.
- Knowledge of black-start and islanded-generation operations.
- Familiarity with BESS integration, grid interconnection, and utility coordination.
- Experience with Root Cause Analysis, emergency response, or Incident Command practices.
- HAZOP, HAZID, RCA, or related safety and risk-management training or certifications strongly preferred.
Ideal Background
Strong candidates may come from large-scale natural-gas generation, utility power, independent power producers, industrial cogeneration, critical infrastructure, or data-center power environments where reliability, safety, procedural discipline, and operational readiness are essential.