CRG is proposing a 600 MW hyperscale campus on 360-plus acres in Festus, Jefferson County, and the talent that facility will eventually need is not waiting around in Jefferson County. The Festus City Council approved the development agreement in March 2026, annexed additional parcels in August 2026, and Ameren is running a power study for the site. What is not yet resolved is the Sunshine Law litigation challenging the rezoning and development agreement, and as of mid-2026 no building permits had been submitted. That gap between announcement and shovel matters enormously to any hiring plan.

Commissioning engineers with ASHRAE, BICSI RCDD, or Uptime Institute Accredited Tier Designer credentials move faster through screening. Critical-facilities engineers should carry a CEM or CFM, and any candidate managing high-voltage switchgear should have documented experience with the specific voltage class the site will run. For operations staff, prior hyperscale experience at a Tier III or Tier IV facility is worth more than a certificate alone. On the construction side, IBEW journeyman cards and operating engineer licenses are the baseline; substation and transmission experience is the differentiator for a campus requiring Ameren interconnection work.

For commissioning roles filled before a permanent operator is named, contract-to-hire structures are common and often preferred by the engineers themselves. Expect to offer per diem and travel coverage for any candidate relocating from outside the St. Louis metro, because the commissioning talent pool will not be within 40 miles. Relocation packages for permanent critical-facilities hires should be front-loaded rather than reimbursement-based; engineers with offers in Phoenix, Northern Virginia, or Dallas will not wait for a reimbursement timeline. For union construction crews, prevailing wage compliance under Missouri rules is non-negotiable and should be built into every subcontractor agreement from day one.

Commissioning engineers come from active project pipelines at competing campuses, not from job boards. Critical-facilities engineers are mostly employed and not browsing; direct outreach to people running similar facilities in the Midwest and Southeast is the realistic path. Entry-level technicians can be found through community college programs, military transition pipelines, and the building-trades apprenticeship network in St. Louis. Construction trades come through the St. Louis Building and Construction Trades Council and the regional IBEW locals that have supplied labor for heavy industrial work along the Mississippi corridor for decades.

The non-obvious problem here is not about geography or union density. Jefferson County has real industrial trades experience, and St. Louis's union building trades have worked large-footprint power-intensive projects for years. The actual hiring risk at Festus is structural: CRG is developing the campus without a named operator, and Sunshine Law litigation is still live. That combination means the entity that will eventually hire permanent operations staff does not exist yet in any hiring capacity, and the construction mobilization timeline is harder to predict than on a typical greenfield build. Early relationships with St. Louis-based specialty contractors and high-voltage power crews will be more valuable here than they would be on a project with a clean entitlement path and an operator already at the table. Any hiring plan for this campus should be built around scenarios, not a single timeline, because the pace of litigation and operator identification will drive the actual mobilization date as much as any construction milestone.

No building permits had been filed as of June 2026. Commissioning engineers need to be identified six to twelve months before systems come online, not six weeks. Critical-facilities operations staff need onboarding time before an operator can run a facility at hyperscale. Working backward from a realistic construction and commissioning schedule means conversations with candidates should start well before ground breaks. Waiting for a permit to begin recruiting for commissioning and operations roles is the most common and most expensive mistake on a project this size.

NextDCX recruits for your toughest data center roles. Share the work, location, and experience your team needs. We run a fresh search for every role, approach people directly, and speak with every candidate before introducing them. You get people screened for the work, pay, location, and availability, ready to meet your hiring team. We also support recruiting partners. If Festus is on your board and the operator question is still open, send us the roles you know you will need and we start now.

For the buildout details, see CRG's Missouri Jefferson County data center filing. Comp sources: ZipRecruiter and dcgeeks 2026 salary data.