Curriculum Vitæ

Saïd Aarab - Datacenter Engineer

I consider myself as generalist that have interset in system/software engineering and that got caried away by work experience, curiosity and opportinities toward operations and hardware support. I started my journey in electronic engineering and then discovered the IT universe and its possibilities in the years 200x. Using my Texas Instument calculator's user manual, I remember I started coding games in my spare time, and I also got some interest in web developpement, developping HTML/CSS using library's computers. While Windows server 2003 was hyped and pushed as the main course for OS learning, I was having fun with my first linux install at home (Mandriva). I droped from school to work for sometime, not too far from the technical universe, before going back to computer science and getting my 2 years technical degree diploma to be able to get a foot back into the IT professional world. Wherther it is datacenter operations/hardware engineering or system/software engineering, I'm very curious towar both universe and do keep an eye on each's innovation, and this makes it easy for me to understand both, pick new thinks up and compensate for any lack of knowledge.

Current areas of Interested :

  • Hardware & Infrastructure innovation
  • Datacenters operational excellence (Productivity, SLAs, safe-by-default, compliance)
  • Continuous innovation of processes and tooling
  • Sustainability, PUE, Power and Cooling
  • Automation for operations (HW build tools : planning, racking and stacking, cabling / repair / decommissionning)
  • Cross-organizational collaboration to unlock new synergies and opportunities for innovations (e.g. Datacenter operations and Infrastucture/Software engineering)
  • Misc : open source (Linux), RISK-V, ASIC, FPGA, Programming (C, Python), Public Cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), IaC, Automation, CI/CD

04/2018 until now : Senior Datacenter Engineer at Salesforce

  • Involved in the whole datacenter lifecycle in a fast paced environement for Salesforce's EU presence : Build - Operations - Capacity Add/Refresh - Decommissioning.
  • Involved in a 24/7 On-call rotation, 1 week each 5 weeks.
  • I got promoted to Senior in August 2022

2012 - 04/2018: Technical field Engineer at CDS, an HPE Company

  • Supporting a large HPE hardware portoflio from Storage, to Compute and Network. With the addition of some 3rd parties hardware for some customers (IBM / DELL)
  • Supporting installation and relocation projects.
  • I've been a resident enginner for sometime for investement banking divisions of Société Générale then Crédit Agricole
  • Involved in a 24/7 On-call rotation, 1 week per month.

2011 – 2012: After Sales/Helpdesk Intern at Alstom Grid (Now GE Grid Solutions)

  • Same role as for Areva T&D

2011 – 2012: After Sales/Helpdesk Intern at Areva T&D (Transmission and Distrubution)

  • RMA and Logistic support for local projects and final customers for Areva T&D high-voltage electrical transmission products.
  • Helpdesk support and assisting in person to resolve hardware and software issues
  • Areva T&D was later sold to Schneider Electric (Distribution) and Alstom (Transmission). I joined the latter.