Private Draft

The 29 personas behind AI

We’ve organized every stage and persona in the AI supply chain, informed by real recruiting at frontier companies. Click any row to see matching profiles from our talent graph.

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Data Center & Facilities

Runs physical AI infra

Data Center & Facilities

Summary

Known as: Data Center Operations Lead, Hardware Operations Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer, Facilities Engineer, Power Engineer, Procurement Manager (Hardware)

Manages physical AI infrastructure at scale: hardware deployment, bring-up, maintenance, incident response, site selection, power procurement, and vendor coordination.

Specializations

Hardware Operations — Hardware deployment, bring-up, maintenance, incident response, and vendor coordination. The hands-on operational layer that keeps GPU clusters healthy and available.

Site Selection, Permitting & Power — Power procurement, grid interconnection, renewable energy sourcing, thermal/cooling engineering, power distribution architecture, site selection, and permitting. Spans facilities/power engineers (electrical, mechanical, thermal design) and commercial/regulatory specialists (site selection, permitting, grid interconnection negotiations). A distinct hiring category as AI data center power demands reach gigawatt scale.

Procurement & Vendor Management — Hardware procurement, vendor management, capacity forecasting, logistics, and supply chain coordination. The operational planning that determines whether compute is available when training teams need it. Different hiring profile from site/power (commercial/operations vs. facilities/energy engineering).

Covers on-prem infrastructure; cloud-native capacity planning (GPU-as-a-service, spot vs. reserved) is a different hiring profile typically staffed alongside serving teams.

Where the Work Lives

[1]Substrate

Primary

Manages physical infrastructure: site selection, power procurement, cooling, and facilities engineering.

[2]Compute

Secondary

Deploys, maintains, and operates GPU clusters and networking hardware at scale.

[3]Intelligence

[4]Systems

[5]Distribution

Candidate Archetypes