A company deploying its first commercial plants.
Commissioning leads, controls engineers, and the plant leadership to run a facility no one on the team has run before.
Energy transition search · first-of-a-kind to the buildout
We staff the build.
Retained search for the energy transition: first-of-a-kind climate hardware, the utility-scale buildout, and the people who move between them.
Book a callElectricity demand is rising for the first time in a generation.
The buildout is not short on capital. It is short on people. The hardest teams to staff sit at the first commercial plants, where every role is filled for the first time and there is no company down the road to hire it from. Most recruiters cannot work these searches. There is no obvious place to poach from. That is the search we run.
02 What we recruit
The whole team, hired in parallel.
■ The plant
- 01 Plant Manager
- 02 Commissioning Lead
- 03 Controls Engineer
- 04 Process Engineer
- 05 Electrical Superintendent
Development & capital
- 06 Project Developer
- 07 Power Systems Engineer
- 08 Grid Integration Lead
- 09 Asset Manager
- 10 Project Finance
How a search runs.
-
01
Map
There is rarely an obvious company to hire from. We map the adjacent talent first: who has commissioned a plant like yours, who has done it at scale, who is ready to move. The map comes before the outreach.
-
02
Build in parallel
A first plant needs its whole team against one date. We run the roles together, commissioning, controls, plant leadership, so the team lands when the site does, not one hire at a time.
-
03
Close
Retained search, run directly. We fill the seats most recruiters pass on, the ones with no easy list to pull from. Every search is confidential, on both sides.
How we work
- Retained
- Engaged for the search, not paid on a resume race. The mandate is worked in full, start to finish.
- In parallel
- The whole team hired against one date, so the plant is staffed when it breaks ground, not months after.
- The hard roles
- The first-of-a-kind seats with no feeder company. Mapping the market is the only way to fill them.
04 The searches we run
Green ammonia
Utility-scale storage
Clean fuels
A developer moving projects from award to operation.
Project development, power systems, and asset management for a pipeline that outgrew the team building it.
A first-of-a-kind plant with every role hired new.
Process engineering, electrical superintendence, and project finance, mapped across an industry with no direct precedent.
Representative engagements. Client names stay confidential; references on request.
05 Founder
The map comes before the call.
Travis is a career recruiter, and he runs every search himself. The method is the one that works in any market with no obvious place to hire from: map the people before the search opens, so you already know who is placeable and who is ready to move before the first call.
Autonomous Search runs technical searches across markets where the right person is hard to find and harder to reach. The energy transition is exactly that market. First plants, first roles, no feeder company. The work is the mapping, done directly, and kept confidential on both sides.
Travis Long, founder
06 Field notes
Notes on staffing the buildout.
01 Buildout · 2026.07.20
All field notes
Who staffs a first commercial plant
The team a first-of-a-kind plant needs, and why it has to be hired in parallel.
02 Talent · 2026.07.07The utility-to-developer exodus
Where developers actually find plant leadership: the regulated utilities training it for free.
03 Talent · 2026.06.23Where FOAK companies find people
First-of-a-kind hardware has no talent pool of its own. So where does it hire from?
07 Contact
A build to staff. Let's talk.
travis@autonomoussearch.io
Los Angeles
Book a 20-minute call
Working in the buildout and open to the right move? Same inbox, same discretion.