Data center design mechanical engineer resume questions

May 29, 2014 9:08 PM

I want to work with a tech company working on the design of data centers! I am very interested in the heat transfer, efficiency, environmental impacts and general mechanical design that goes into data centers. I have a few connections to a couple of the big tech companies here in Seattle and don't want to waste my opportunity. How should I shape my resume and what skills should I highlight?

I am a mechanical engineer that worked for an electrical construction engineering company (mass electric) in college. The last five years I have worked as a naval nuclear reactor engineer for the department of defense. My recent experience is primarily with shielding design/installation, high risk detector replacement and "trouble desk engineering". Unfortunately, I doubt the specialized radiation and contamination knowledge will be helpful except for the mindset.

What key skills should I highlight on my resume for data center design? Obviously, heat transfer and fluid dynamic experience would be great but i don't have a huge amount besides school. I am strong on the mechanical statics/moment type design and fabrication. I interact with work crew wells, and the paperwork I write has had to be extremely detailed and be able to be followed with 100% verbatim compliance.

I would be happy to send my current "generic" resume to anyone.

Thanks!

posted by Black_Umbrella to Work & Money (4 answers total)

Best answer: To be honest, that sounds like a pretty solid resume as it is. Any experience with disaster preparedness, heat transfer, fire suppression, power redundancy and storage is good. Have you contacted anyone at Amazon?
posted by empath at 10:23 PM on May 29, 2014

I work for a large, but not amazon-sized, household name ecommerce company. The reality is we do capital upgrades to our datacenters once every 3-5 years. In that regard you'd be better working for a consultancy (we have hired such to do airflow/heat transfer analysis) vs a tech company directly. There are exceptions (amazon as empath mentioned perhaps) but you might want to start with boutique engineering firm if you can't get any traction at a top-5 ecommerce or hosting company.
posted by These Premises Are Alarmed at 11:57 PM on May 29, 2014

Yeah, most tech companies would not deal with this sort of thing EVER. They're just hosting their gear at some place like Equinix (who you should probably also contact).
posted by empath at 12:16 AM on May 30, 2014 [1 favorite]

Best answer: That sounds like a solid resume as-is. The only tech companies I can think of who do their own data centers are Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google. And even then, some of the sites they use are just hosted at a facility run by someone like Dupont Fabros. I don't know who the big consulting or engineering companies are who engineer stuff like that. You might do well to work your connections to see who else to talk to - who do they use for consultants and engineering? There are also smaller companies that end up working on smaller facilities - data center spaces at universities and hospitals. I don't know if you can find info about whose been bidding those sorts of things, but that would be another place to look.
posted by rmd1023 at 10:50 AM on May 31, 2014