How to Evaluate a Director of Engineering Candidate: What Most Institutional Searches Get Wrong
The Director of Engineering is one of the most consequential and consistently underappreciated roles in institutional facilities management. At a university, health system, cultural institution, or large nonprofit with a substantial real estate portfolio, the Director of Engineering is responsible for the systems that determine whether the buildings work: electrical distribution, mechanical and HVAC systems, plumbing, life safety, building automation, and in many cases central plant operations including chilled water, steam, and emergency power. When this role is filled well, the institution rarely notices it. When it is filled poorly, the deferred maintenance backlog grows, system failures multiply, regulatory compliance becomes a recurring problem, and capital replacement planning falls out of sync with actual system condition. The consequences are expensive and slow to reverse.
Matt Lesher, search consultant at Real8 Group, works on Director of Engineering and VP of Facilities searches across higher education, healthcare, cultural institutions, and owners’ rep firms. In this post, he explains what effective evaluation of a Director of Engineering candidate actually looks like, and where institutional hiring processes most commonly miss.
Why the Role Is Chronically Underleveled
One of the structural problems Matt observes consistently in institutional Director of Engineering searches is that the role is frequently scoped and compensated below what the technical complexity of the position actually requires. A Director of Engineering at a major research university managing a portfolio of aging buildings with decommissioned central plants, distributed electrical infrastructure that predates modern BAS integration, and a capital replacement queue that exceeds the annual facilities budget by a factor of four is doing work that is as technically demanding as any VP of Facilities role in the market. But because the title says Director, the compensation band and the candidate profile often reflect a narrower conception of the role than the institution actually needs filled.
This mismatch between role complexity and compensation positioning drives two problems simultaneously: the institution attracts candidates whose experience is genuinely below what the position requires, and it loses candidates whose experience is a strong match because the compensation does not reflect what they would be stepping into. Director of Engineering compensation at major research universities and academic medical centers ranges from $175,000 to $250,000 in total compensation, with the upper end found at institutions with large, complex MEP portfolios and significant central plant responsibilities. Institutions that offer the lower end of that range for roles with upper-end complexity are consistently disappointed by their candidate slates.
What to Evaluate and How
Technical Systems Depth: Where the Interview Has to Go
The most important evaluation dimension for a Director of Engineering, and the one that institutional search processes most often handle inadequately, is genuine technical depth in the MEP systems the role is responsible for. This cannot be assessed through a narrative about career history or a general discussion of leadership philosophy. It requires specific, technical questions about the systems the candidate has managed: how they approach commissioning a new central plant addition, what their process is for evaluating chilled water plant performance and identifying efficiency opportunities, how they manage the relationship between capital replacement planning and preventive maintenance program design, and what their approach is to life safety systems compliance in a large, complex, multi-building portfolio.
Candidates who have genuine technical depth in these areas answer these questions with specificity: specific system configurations, specific performance metrics, specific decisions they made and why. Candidates who are strong managers but technically shallow answer with process: how they would assemble a team to assess the situation, what framework they would use to organize the analysis, who they would consult. Both types of candidates can interview well in a general leadership context. Only the questions that require technical specificity reliably distinguish them, and those questions need to be designed and asked by someone who can evaluate the answers.
Who Should Be in the Interview Room
This brings Matt to one of the most common structural failures in Director of Engineering searches: the technical evaluation is conducted by people who do not have the technical background to assess the candidate’s answers. HR professionals, general operations executives, and even VP of Facilities leaders whose own backgrounds are primarily in capital program management or real estate rather than MEP systems can conduct competent general interviews with Director of Engineering candidates without ever discovering whether the candidate actually knows what they are talking about at the system level. The institution feels like it ran a thorough process and comes away with a hire that turns out to be technically weaker than the role required.
The technical interview for a Director of Engineering should involve at least one person who can actually evaluate the technical content of the candidate’s answers: a Chief Engineer, a senior facilities manager with direct MEP system management experience, a consulting mechanical or electrical engineer engaged for the search, or a peer from another institution who has agreed to participate in the evaluation. If none of those options are available, the search partner should be asked to conduct a technical screen before the institutional interview rounds begin. This is not a secondary consideration. The technical depth question is the central evaluation question for this role, and the process has to be designed to answer it.
Regulatory and Compliance Fluency
Institutional engineering directors operate in a regulatory environment that is more complex than most commercial facilities settings. Joint Commission compliance for healthcare institutions, OSHA confined space and electrical safety requirements, state boiler and pressure vessel regulations, EPA refrigerant management requirements, fire marshal annual inspection processes, and in some cases nuclear regulatory requirements for research universities with reactor facilities all land in the Director of Engineering’s portfolio. Candidates who have managed a complex institutional engineering program understand how compliance obligations map onto maintenance program design and capital planning. Those who have not often discover the complexity after they have been hired, which is an expensive way to learn it.
Effective evaluation of regulatory and compliance fluency involves asking the candidate to walk through how they manage the annual inspection and compliance calendar for a complex portfolio, what their process is for closing out inspection findings with the relevant regulatory bodies, and how they have handled a situation where a compliance deadline was at risk. These questions are not trick questions. Candidates with genuine institutional engineering management experience answer them with the matter-of-fact specificity of someone who has done this work. Candidates without it tend toward vague process descriptions that do not hold up to follow-up.
Capital Planning Integration: The Strategic Dimension
The Director of Engineering who can connect MEP system condition data to capital planning decisions in a way that the CFO and Board can act on is operating at a level above the purely technical role and is genuinely rare. Most institutions want this capability; fewer than half actually have a Director of Engineering who has developed it. Assessing whether a candidate has this capability requires asking about specific capital planning tools and frameworks they have used: how they build and maintain a facility condition assessment data set, how they prioritize capital replacement recommendations when the queue significantly exceeds available funding, and how they communicate system risk and replacement urgency to non-technical institutional leadership in terms that produce action rather than deferred decisions.
Candidates who have developed this capability describe specific systems, specific conversations with CFOs or board committees, and specific outcomes, including cases where their analysis changed a capital allocation decision. Candidates who have not tend to describe the capability as something they would develop in the role or something their team handles. At the Director of Engineering level, the institution is not hiring someone to develop this capability over the next three years. It is hiring someone who has it now.
A Note on Succession and Timing
Matt also observes that Director of Engineering searches at institutions with aging engineering leadership often start later than they should. The retirement wave in institutional engineering and facilities management is real, and the lead time required to find, evaluate, and successfully onboard a Director of Engineering with genuine technical depth is consistently longer than institutions expect. A search that begins six months before a planned retirement is a well-positioned search. One that begins two months before, or after the retirement has already happened, is a crisis search, and crisis searches consistently produce weaker outcomes than planned ones. If your Director of Engineering is within three years of expected retirement, the time to assess the succession landscape is now, not when the departure becomes imminent.
Matt Lesher works on Director of Engineering and VP of Facilities searches for institutional clients at Real8 Group. To discuss a current search or learn more about how Real8 approaches technical evaluation in facilities leadership, visit real8group.com/finding-talent, learn about our team at real8group.com/team, or reach out at real8group.com/contact.
Real8 Group is a specialized executive search firm serving the real estate, construction, engineering, and facilities operations sectors across the U.S.