Lead Datacenter Technician

About the role

You will lead a team of datacenter technicians at a hyperscale cloud provider, responsible for the hardware health of a full datacenter hall containing tens of thousands of servers. You will split your time between the toughest technical escalations that exceed the team's capability and the leadership work that keeps a dozen technicians performing consistently across all shifts. Your hall's availability metrics, your SLA compliance, and your team's growth and retention are all your scorecard, and you will be accountable for each. You will represent your hall in cross-functional planning, translating capacity and maintenance needs into resource requests leadership can act on. Your hall will be the one other halls benchmark against.

What you will achieve

• Hold your hall's hardware SLA performance at or above target quarter after quarter through disciplined execution, proactive maintenance, and relentless follow-through on recurring issues.
• Resolve escalated technical issues personally when they exceed the team's capability, modeling the diagnostic rigor and documentation quality you expect from everyone.
• Build a training program with measurable competency checkpoints that takes new hires from onboarding to full independence within 90 days.
• Drive continuous improvement across shifts: standardizing best practices, eliminating recurring procedural errors, and sharing lessons learned so the same mistake never happens twice.
• Manage shift coverage, overtime distribution, and team morale so the hall is always staffed with rested, engaged technicians and turnover stays low.

What you will bring

Must-haves

• 7 or more years of datacenter operations experience with deep, broad hardware expertise.
• Prior experience leading technicians formally or informally, with evidence of improved team performance under your leadership.
• Strong organizational skills: scheduling across shifts, prioritization under competing demands, and workload balancing.
• Ability to communicate technical status, resource needs, and risks clearly to management in business terms.
• Safety-first leadership with a personal record of incident-free operations and the authority to stop unsafe work.
• Technical certifications or equivalent expertise recognized across the organization.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with lean, Six Sigma, or continuous improvement programs in operations environments.
• Familiarity with capacity planning, hardware lifecycle management, and refresh budgeting.
• Background in multi-site or global operations coordination.
• Knowledge of labor relations and constructive performance management.