Data centre careers
The roles that keep data centres running, from a first job to running a site. Each page says what the role does, the skills it needs, and the ways in. Licences depend on the country you work in.
Pages for a country, with its licences and local details: Australia
Ways in from outside the industry
- From school leaver or apprentice to Critical Facilities Trainee
- From IT support to Critical Facilities Operator
- From facilities or building maintenance to Critical Facilities Operator
- From ex-military technical trades to Critical Facilities Technician
- From licensed electrician to Critical Facilities Technician
- From licensed electrician to Senior Technician, Electrical
- From refrigeration mechanic to Senior Technician, Mechanical and Cooling
- From industrial automation or building controls to Senior Technician, Controls and BMS
- From IT support to Senior Technician, Controls and BMS
- From IT support to Data Centre Operator
- From warehouse or logistics to Data Centre Operator
- From IT support to Data Centre Technician
- From security officer to Physical Security Operations Lead
- From network support to Data Centre Technician, Network
- From linux or systems administration to Data Centre Technician, Systems
- From IT or network support to Operations Centre Technician
- From network engineer elsewhere to Data Centre Network Engineer
- From systems administration to Virtualisation Administrator
- From warehouse or logistics to Logistics Technician
- From IT support to Facilities and IT Technician
- From licensed electrician to Facilities and IT Technician
The ladder
Entry
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Critical Facilities Operator
Walks the rounds of a data centre’s power and cooling plant, answers routine alarms and helps with maintenance, following the site’s procedures.
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Data Centre Operator
White space and IT hardware
Works in the data hall following the site’s procedures: installs equipment in racks, patches and traces cabling, keeps the airflow right, and handles routine requests from customers.
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Logistics Technician
Logistics
Receives, ships, counts and tracks a data centre’s equipment, keeps data-bearing devices in custody and destroys them, and stages equipment for installation.
Technician
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Critical Facilities Technician
Runs and maintains a data centre’s power and cooling plant on a shift, including planned transfers, bypasses and isolations, without supervision.
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Data Centre Technician
White space and IT hardware
Keeps the servers, network and cabling in a data hall working: installs and moves equipment, fixes faults, and answers customers’ remote-hands requests.
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Operations Centre Technician
Operations centre
Watches facility and network alarms from an operations centre, works out what matters, keeps the tickets, and sends site staff to fix things.
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Facilities and IT Technician
Facilities and IT (merged)
Runs both the power and cooling plant and the data hall at a site too small for two crews, such as an edge or enterprise site, a small colocation centre or a modular AI site.
Senior and specialist
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Senior Critical Facilities Technician
The shift’s most experienced operator across power and cooling: leads planned work and the first response to a fault, and coaches the rest of the crew.
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Senior Technician, Electrical
Electrical (LV and MV)
The site’s electrical specialist on shift: switching low and high voltage, transfers, UPS systems and generators, under the authorisations each needs.
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Senior Technician, Mechanical and Cooling
Mechanical and Cooling
The site’s cooling specialist on shift: chillers, air handlers, pumps and cooling towers, refrigerants, and restarting cooling after a failure.
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Senior Technician, Controls and BMS
Controls and BMS
The site’s controls specialist: the building management system, fire and suppression systems, and the alarms that come from them.
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Senior Data Centre Technician
White space and IT hardware
The data hall’s most experienced technician: complex installs, moves and changes, the hardest faults, and coaching other technicians.
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Physical Security Operations Lead
Physical security (adjacent line)
Runs a data centre’s physical security on a shift: access, escorts, cameras, and the response to alarms.
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Data Centre Technician, Network
Network
The data hall’s network technician: installs, configures and fixes network devices and circuits on site.
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Data Centre Technician, Systems
Systems
The data hall’s systems technician: diagnoses servers, updates firmware, rebuilds operating systems and patches hypervisor hosts on site.
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Virtualisation Administrator
Systems administration
Runs the virtualisation platform at an enterprise or government data centre, where the owner runs its own workloads.
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Logistics and Inventory Specialist
Logistics
Controls a data centre’s inventory and its custody rules, forecasts materials, and oversees logistics vendors.
Lead and engineer
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Lead Critical Facilities Technician
Leads a crew through its shift: assigns the work, is the first person the crew turns to, keeps the schedule, and runs the handover and the response when something fails.
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Commissioning Engineer
Commissioning (adjacent line)
Proves that new and changed plant works before it carries load: functional tests, integrated systems tests and handover to the operators.
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EHS Specialist
Environment, health and safety (adjacent line)
Keeps a data centre’s safety system working with the site’s leaders: risk assessments, permits, isolations, emergencies and learning from incidents.
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Lead Data Centre Technician
White space and IT hardware
Leads the data hall technicians on a shift: assigns and checks the work, takes the last technical escalation, and coaches.
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Operations Centre Supervisor
Operations centre
Runs an operations centre’s shift: its people, how it sorts alarms, and the calls that run major incidents.
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Data Centre Network Engineer
Network engineering
Builds and runs a data centre’s network: deploys and commissions devices, routes traffic, and fixes what breaks.
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Virtualisation Engineer
Systems administration
Designs and runs the virtualisation platform at an enterprise or government data centre.
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OT Controls Engineer
Controls and BMS
Designs, separates and governs a data centre’s control networks, and manages their vulnerabilities, at a site or across a region.
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OT Cybersecurity Engineer
Cyber and OT security (central)
Secures a data centre’s operational technology from the cyber security team: inventory, separation of networks, vulnerabilities, access, events and audits.
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Cluster Commissioning Engineer
Commissioning (adjacent line)
Brings compute, network fabric and storage from delivery to working capacity, at one site or travelling between sites.
Supervisor and manager
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Critical Facilities Supervisor
Manages the shift crews as people: hiring, rosters, performance and pay, and stands in for the facilities manager.
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Chief Engineer
The site’s technical authority: owns its procedures, reviews its changes, finds the root causes of failures, and accepts new plant into service.
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Data Centre Technician Manager
White space and IT hardware
Manages the data hall technicians as people, and the remote-hands service customers rely on.
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Network Engineering Manager
Network engineering
Manages a network engineering team for a site or a region.
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Logistics Manager
Logistics
Manages a site’s or a region’s logistics: its people, vendors, materials and the programme that wipes or destroys data-bearing devices.
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Facilities Assurance Lead
Provider assurance
Checks the facilities of a data centre someone else runs, for a tenant, an AI lab or an owner: assesses sites, audits maintenance and reviews switching plans.
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IT Operations Assurance Lead
Provider assurance
Checks the IT operations of a data centre a partner runs, for a tenant or an AI lab: rack intake, repairs and returns, network fabric work and who is responsible for what.
Site and operations management
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Critical Facilities Manager
Runs a data centre’s facilities: its people, its operating limits, its customers and its incidents, and leads its safety duties.
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Data Centre Site Manager
Site management
Runs a data centre’s facilities, IT hardware, network and logistics together, as GPU clouds and new AI sites do.
Sources and licences
- Critical Facilities reference framework © Facility Labs. (CC BY 4.0)
- ISCO-08, International Labour Organization, as published in ESCO v1.2.1. This service uses the ESCO classification of the European Commission. (Commission Decision 2011/833/EU on the reuse of Commission documents)