Microsoft planning to employ robots to help automate datacenters

Devesh Beri

Microsoft is looking for a Team Manager to lead a new team dedicated to the automation of data centre operations using robotics. This comes just weeks after the company blamed an outage at its Australia facility on having insufficient staff available.

It was announced by Sean JamesSean James, Sr Director of Datacenter Research at Microsoft, on LinkedIn. His post said that he is looking for automation people to join his team in automating data centre operations. He says it is the best job ever and that they want their data centres to be safe and efficient.

Key details about this job posting:

  1. Requirements: The ideal candidate is expected to have three or more years of professional hands-on experience working on automation and robotics for hardware equipment. In addition to technical qualifications, they should have experience in engineering or technical program management and team management skills.
  2. Role Description: The role demands a deep understanding of automation and robotics, along with leadership, organizational, and communication skills.
  3. Location: While the role is notionally based at Microsoft’s Redmond site, it may offer up to 100 per cent work-from-home flexibility.
  4. Salary Range: The typical pay range for this role is $133,600 to $256,800 per year, with special cases in San Francisco and New York offering $173,200 to $282,200 per year.

Microsoft isn’t the only company developing robotic automation for data centre operations. Attendees at the Open Compute Summit this week can see a prototype robotic server cart that is designed to move data centre racks from location to location while they are still full of hardware.

It is unclear what specific tasks Microsoft’s new team will be working on, but the company has said that it is looking to “make data centres safer and more efficient.” The team is expected to begin work in early 2024.

Datacenter automation can lead to cost savings, increased efficiency, and reduced downtime. The incident in Microsoft’s Australia data centre may have highlighted the need for more advanced automation in data centre operations.

via The Register