Senior Director, Utility Strategy and Market Design

The Role

Following Madison’s groundbreaking

Community Infrastructure announcement to develop 1 GW and mobilize up to $2 billion in capital, we are hiring a leader to own MEI’s relationships with utilities, ISOs/RTOs, and state utility regulators. This person will be critical in helping MEI shape the market rules and utility programs that determine whether distributed storage and solar can be interconnected, accredited, and compensated at the massive scale our plan requires.

This person will own MEI’s influence in those proceedings — identifying which rules actually matter to our thesis, deciding where our effort is best spent, and working directly with utilities and commission staff to craft programs that work for the utility, the Digital Infrastructure Partners, the community, and MEI at the same time.

This is a utility- and regulator-facing role, not a legislative one. A separate hire will own policy and government relations — legislative advocacy, executive branch engagement, and trade association strategy. The external counterparts for this role are the utility resource planner, the distribution engineer, the DER program manager, the commission staffer, and the ISO stakeholder committee: the people who design programs and write rules.

The two roles will coordinate closely, but the mandate here is technical, program-level, and commercial.

This person will own MEI’s assessment of market and interconnection viability — verifying that the ISO, RTO, and utility will allow us to interconnect and provide capacity in a given location, now or on a known timeline, and building the path to change that where they will not. That assessment directly determines where MEI commits development capital, so the rigor and honesty of this work matters.

This role is ideal for someone who understands how utilities and their regulators make decisions — who has worked inside a rate case, a distribution plan, or a DER program design — and is ready to apply that experience directly. Credibility with utility and commission counterparts, and sound judgment about where to focus effort, are the core assets.

Responsibilities

• Decide which dockets, filings, rulemakings, and stakeholder processes are worth MEI's time across our priority markets, and keep that view current as new market structures emerge
• Lead viability assessments across every candidate market: document whether and when MEI can interconnect and earn capacity, on a timeline that supports capital allocation decisions
• Represent MEI directly with ISOs, commissions, and utility program teams, building the relationships and credibility that get MEI a seat when programs and tariffs are designed
• Co-design those programs and tariffs so storage and solar read as the utility's solution to capacity, reliability, and local benefit, not an obligation to accommodate
• Build the bench — outside counsel, technical consultants, and AI tools — so the work doesn't run through one person
• Translate regulatory reality into commercial terms for development, commercial, finance, and Digital Infrastructure Partnerships, and brief the CDO, Executive Team, and Board on how those assumptions are evolving

Qualifications

• Required
• Bachelor’s degree, with coursework or experience in engineering, economics, public policy, or a related field
• 8+ years in utility regulatory strategy, grid or resource planning, DER program design, market design, or regulatory consulting, including meaningful time inside a utility, commission, or ISO/RTO, or advising them closely
• A demonstrated track record of changing an outcome: a tariff, program, interconnection standard, or market rule that exists in its current form in part because of your work
• Technical fluency in distributed storage and solar — interconnection, hosting capacity, aggregation, capacity accreditation — and a working understanding of how each flows through to project economics
• Ability to write for a regulatory audience and to explain the same content to a commercial team in plain language
• Self-directed operator comfortable representing MEI alone in a room of utility and commission counterparts, and holding a position respectfully when it matters
• Willing and able to travel 30–40% for utility, commission, and ISO/RTO engagement
• Preferred
• PJM experience, including capacity market and accreditation mechanics, and familiarity with state distributed generation programs (Illinois, Maryland, Ohio, New York, Virginia)
• Experience with FERC proceedings and formal ISO/RTO stakeholder processes
• Familiarity with DER aggregation, DERMS, virtual power plants, and non-wires alternatives
• Experience building new programs or functions inside a large, complex organization
• Comfortable using artificial intelligence tools and capable of building agents to perform specific tasks

What We Value

• Sound judgment about where to spend MEI's effort; knows which dockets, rules, and relationships move the 1 GW plan, and which don't
• Credible alone in the room with utility and commission counterparts; holds a position under pressure without burning the relationship
• Commercial lens on regulatory engagement; translates rule changes into what they mean for project economics and capital allocation
• Intellectual rigor and honesty in technical assessment, especially when the answer is "this market doesn't pencil yet"
• Collaborative across development, commercial, finance, and outside counsel without losing ownership of the call
• Interest in utility and grid modernization