---
title: 'VP of Projects at Candid Intelligence'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/vp-of-projects-candid-intelligence-houston-q1n7k9c3by99'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# VP of Projects at Candid Intelligence

- **Company:** Candid Intelligence
- **Location:** Houston, TX
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-04-16
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/candidintelligence/58a53c87-f5e3-43ab-892e-0e2623e9408a

## Job description

## About Candid

Candid is the AI execution layer for capital projects in behind-the-meter gas-fired power generation. We compress pre-FEED and FEED schedules by 30%+ at full engineering quality, run by senior PEs on top of a software platform built around how this work actually gets done. We recently closed a $6.5M round led by Schneider Electric and Yann LeCun. Active pipeline: 200 MW to 2.4 GW BTM gas projects serving AI factories, hyperscale data centers, and gas-to-nuclear bridge architectures across Texas and the Gulf Coast.

## The Role

You lead Candid's engineering practice. Walk into the room with a 30-year nuclear-trained CEO or a Fortune 500 head of engineering and be a peer on day one. Hire the project directors. Stamp the deliverables. Defend Candid against incumbent EPCs (B&V, Bechtel, S&L, B&McD, Worley) on FEED bids. Shape what the platform team builds by feeding back what the work actually needs.

## What You'll Do

- Lead engineering practice across BTM gas-fired power projects, 200 MW to multi-GW
- Serve as senior engineering counterparty to client CEOs, Heads of Engineering, VPs of Projects
- Stamp FEL-2 / FEED deliverables; defend Class 4 estimates with lenders, IC, incumbent EPCs
- Build and lead the engineering team — project directors, senior PEs, multi-discipline leads
- Architect Candid's dual-team execution model (Project Execution Team + FlowState platform team)
- Shape the platform roadmap with the AI engineering team

## What You Bring

- 20+ years in power generation engineering, deep on combined-cycle and simple-cycle gas
- Directed engineering on at least two gas plants at FEED or EPC stage ($200M+ capex). Owned, not participated.
- PE-licensed in Texas (multi-state ideal)
- Background at a major power EPC (S&L, B&McD, Bechtel Power, B&V, Worley, Kiewit) or owner-operator (Vistra, Constellation, NRG, Talen, Duke, AES)
- Have run 10+ disciplines in parallel through HAZID, IDC, IFR, IFI cycles
- BTM / islanded / co-located generation experience — paralleling, redundancy mapping, microgrid architecture
- Tech-friendly without being naive. You see waste in conventional FEL execution and want to fix it.
- Houston-based or relocatable

## Nice to Have

- Nuclear-adjacent BOP work (Vogtle, Palisades, NuScale, BWRX-300, Stone & Webster)
- Data center critical-power experience (Tier III/IV)
- ERCOT or PJM market familiarity
- Direct experience with project-finance / IC / lender engineering review
- Compensation
- Senior base + meaningful equity. Unlimited PTO. Medical, dental, vision. Daily lunch and dinner. $150/month wellness budget.

## About Candid Intelligence

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Candid Intelligence builds AI-driven software to compress pre-construction timelines for large energy and industrial infrastructure projects, helping owner-operators and EPCs reach Final Investment Decision (FID) faster.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Talha Faiz (Co-Founder & CEO) and Hassan Azmat (Co-Founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Construction (energy infrastructure, data centers, process plants, nuclear facilities)
- **Target customers**: B2B Enterprise – owner-operators (e.g., Shell, SABIC, Meta) and EPCs (e.g., Worley, Burns & McDonnell, McDermott)
- **Mission**: Collapse pre-construction timelines and free engineers to build the infrastructure the world actually needs.

## Products & Services
- **Candid AI Platform**: An AI-assisted system that ingests engineering drawings (P&IDs, isometrics, plot plans), builds knowledge graphs, orchestrates multi-agent workflows, and enables real-time document reconciliation. Designed to compress FEED (Front-End Engineering Design) from months to days and improve cost certainty from ±30% to ±20% [candidintelligence.com](https://www.candidintelligence.com/).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding raised – $6.5M (Seed round, as of 2025) [candidintelligence.com](https://www.candidintelligence.com/join)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: E14 Fund (MIT’s venture fund), Liquid 2 Ventures, Flexcap Ventures, and angel investors including Yann LeCun and Carnegie Mellon alumni [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/candid-intelligence) [candidintelligence.com](https://www.candidintelligence.com/join)
- **Growth Signals**: POCs with leading EPCs; clear success metrics to beat “pilot purgatory”; backed by investors of OpenAI and xAI; team intentionally capped at 10 people until $100M revenue [candidintelligence.com](https://www.candidintelligence.com/join)

## Competitive Advantages
- **On-premise deployment**: All models and data stay within customer infrastructure, ensuring control and compliance for mission-critical projects.
- **Human-led AI**: The platform assists but does not replace engineers; every output is reviewable, editable, and requires human approval.
- **Institutional knowledge capture**: Senior engineer judgment and assumptions are preserved and made reusable across projects.
- **Proven domain focus**: Built by engineers with backgrounds in aerospace, finance, and national-scale systems, tailored specifically to energy infrastructure pre-construction.

## Strategic Focus
- **Collapse pre-construction timelines**: Reduce the typical 2-year pre-construction phase to weeks, enabling earlier FID and faster project delivery.
- **Expand into adjacent verticals**: Data centers, nuclear facilities, and other large-scale capital projects that share similar engineering workflows.
- **Maintain lean team**: Aim to keep headcount under 10 until reaching $100M in revenue, relying on automation and 10× builders.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: “Partners, not employees” – self-directed, self-managed, and shared control over strategy. No managers, only builders.
- **Remote-first**: Default remote, with plans for an in-person hub in Houston to stay close to customers. Meetings only when vital.
- **Compensation**: High and equal base pay with profit-sharing for all partners. Success is shared directly.
- **Engineering focus**: Small team of top-tier builders; every partner is a full-stack builder with deep expertise in AI, infrastructure, or energy engineering.
- **Impact**: Work on problems that directly affect the $2T energy infrastructure industry – only 1 in 200 projects finish on time and budget.

## Sources
1. [candidintelligence.com](https://www.candidintelligence.com/)
2. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/candid-intelligence)
3. [candidintelligence.com/join](https://www.candidintelligence.com/join)
4. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/candid-intelligence)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/candidintelligence)

## Other roles at Candid Intelligence

- [Senior Piping Engineer (Power Generation / Gas-to-Power)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-piping-engineer-power-generation-gas-to-power-candid-intelligence-san-14md286vexb3) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Electrical Engineer (Power Generation / Gas-to-Power)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-electrical-engineer-power-generation-gas-to-power-candid-intelligence-q1xvdb9ew137) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Mechanical Engineer (Power Generation / Gas-to-Power)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-mechanical-engineer-power-generation-gas-to-power-candid-intelligence-4yyv02f8rhr4) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Process Engineer (Power Generation / Gas-to-Power)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-process-engineer-power-generation-gas-to-power-candid-intelligence-san-95g70nyy5m2h) — San Francisco, CA
- [Director of Engineering Delivery (Power Generation / Gas-to-Power)](https://feeny.ai/job/director-of-engineering-delivery-power-generation-gas-to-power-candid-w84v0qypjnre) — Houston, TX
- [Sales Engineer (EPC and Owner/Operator) - Houston](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-engineer-epc-and-owner-operator-houston-candid-intelligence-houston-7w9vz9sxt5nm) — Houston, TX