Senior Director of Engineering

at  Digital Realty

JOB MAGNITUDE

Latitude: This Position reports directly to the SVP Global Design & Construction and is a senior member of the EMEA DE&C leadership team with management responsibility for Design & Engineering. Internal contact with all departments. External contact with customers, suppliers, and customers.
Level of Impact: Important contributor to the achievement of the corporate Design & Engineering goals and objectives. Erroneous execution may result in delays of projects and/or operations and will cause significant expenditure of additional time and resources and/or impact to the customers. Erroneous execution and decision making will have material impact on business performance.

Budget: Acting as stakeholder for construction project budgets.

• Responsible for the Design & Engineering of all DLR data centres in EMEA in close cooperation with central functions and both Global and EMEA management. This includes the responsibility for managing the entire Design & Engineering team at all locations and give Leadership to the direct reports.
• Drives cost savings through optimizations and improvements in the data centre design, as well in EMEA procurement options
• Develop clearly defined objectives and strategies, lead and/or contribute to assigned global, cross-functional interdisciplinary, high priority initiatives, process optimization and ensure delivery.
• Is responsible for all Design & Engineering KPIs and fulfilment. Ensures all management have the required capability to deliver stretch targets.
• Supports Sales and Marketing in large and strategic opportunities. This Position reports directly to the SVP Global Construction & Delivery and has management responsibility for the entire area of Design & Engineering working closely with e.g., the country-based teams, the regional construction teams in EMEA, Procurement and PMO office. etc. Internal contact with all regional and global departments. External contact with auditors, suppliers and customers.

ESSENTIAL KNOWLEDGE

• Extensive experience and understanding of all data centre functions (construction costs, production operations, network, change control, DR/Business recovery, customer support, systems management, and facilities).
• Possess exceptional technical expertise, including comprehensive understanding both critical electrical and mechanical data centers infrastructures and the associated equipment such as UPS systems, generator systems, Chillers, etc. and other requirements for Data Centre infrastructure and environments.
• Knowledge of or training in Telecommunications Engineering, fibre optic cabling and splicing or data centre / facility experience is a distinct advantage.
• Extensive experience in managing construction budgets and how this is impacted by the actual design.
• Experience of managing suppliers and supplier performance management.
• Significant knowledge/experience in data centre and infrastructure projects - data centre expansion and new build.
• Extensive experience in managing capital projects more than Euro 100 million.
• Director level or equivalent experience in making trade off decision between costs and service. Experience of implementing and influencing group strategy plus working in a management team

QUALIFICATIONS

• Educated Master’s degree level in a technical field
• Minimum of 10+ years’ experience as engineer in an electro technical and /or an industrial/mechanical engineering environment and Tier data centre designs/operations.
• Minimum of 5+ year’s people management experience including hiring and development of staff gained in both operational and project activities.
• Fluent in English plus other languages preferred; German, French

To provide EMEA Design & Engineering leadership and manage all related activities and staff to ensure that DLR data centres are designed and engineered in such that:

• Customer experience is continually improved, and all capabilities are in place to ensure customer SLAs are achievable and achieved.
• All new construction of data centre capacity, both expansion and new build, is carried out to defined engineering standards, is within the corporate Expansion and Build Out process and achieves relevant Business Case objectives such as build cost and timescale.
• All global, local, and national regulations are adhered to such as health and safety, environmental and ensure adherence to corporate standards in terms of data centre build and operation, quality standards, customer service, security and ICT policies.

Provide Director level leadership, sufficient to fully understand the company’s strategy and how the company plan for the next 5 years and beyond supports the company strategy; and equally identify what issues the company strategy raises for the countries and its customers and actively work with other HQ and Global teams to address them:

• Determine and understand the customer needs in the longer term and how they align to corporate targets, customer needs and gaps to be addressed, including investment will be needed to achieve any higher or lower levels of service than standard offers.
• Agree plans for Design & Engineering activity, including the mix of in-house vs outsourced activities - both to third party and other HQ functions, so that service is improved, and cost reduced.
• Define the Design & Engineering strategy to corporate strategy and targets working with the Construction team on e.g. what types of vendors to use, tendering process, build cost reduction etc