Interconnection is now a talent problem.

For a decade, interconnection sat in the engineering back office. Queue reform, cluster studies and network-upgrade cost allocation have moved it to the centre of the deal - and turned a technical discipline into a commercial one.

The consequence shows up in every search we run. Developers no longer want an interconnection engineer who can manage a study process; they want someone who can read a cluster study like a term sheet, price upgrade risk into an offtake strategy, and tell an investment committee which positions in the queue are worth defending. That profile barely existed five years ago. Today it decides bids.

The pool is small, and it is not growing fast

The people who genuinely carry this skill set learned it inside ISOs, transmission owners, or the handful of developers that industrialised their queue strategy early. They are employed, well-compensated, and rarely public about being open to a move. Job postings do not reach them; sequenced, discreet conversations do.

"Developers no longer want a study manager. They want someone who reads a cluster study like a term sheet."

Compensation reflects the scarcity. In the last twelve months we have watched interconnection leadership packages converge with development leadership - and in contested searches, exceed them. Companies benchmarking against two-year-old data are consistently losing their first-choice candidate at offer stage.

What strong hiring looks like

The developers winning these searches share three habits: they scope the role around commercial judgement rather than process management; they move from first conversation to offer inside six weeks; and they let the candidate meet the investment committee early, because this hire wants to know the capital behind the pipeline as much as the pipeline itself.

If interconnection capability is on your hiring plan for the next twelve months, the market will not get easier. The right time to map it is before the role is urgent.