Conlan Elijah Sykes

• Leading technical operations and infrastructure development for Microsoft's Fairwater Project, the world's largest AI data center, based in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin.
• Coordinating data center technician teams, operational readiness, and cross-functional execution for hyperscale AI infrastructure.

• Managed night operations for a multi‑billion dollar datacenter cluster; primary escalation for incidents/outages; executed pivot plans during high‑risk scenarios across 14+ buildings; owned multi‑team projects in the PDX East region.
• Developed leadership pipeline: trained 2 shift leads; promoted 5 builders; introduced 1:1 templates adopted by other managers.
• Consolidated documentation into a single KB; authored SOPs/runbooks; standardized safety/readiness training and drills.
• Sponsored team‑proposed projects from proposal through budget/approval to execution; aligned with operational priorities.
• Built staffing/operations dashboards and automations (Python/TypeScript) adopted by 100+ builders; sustained >99.99% uptime.

• Led and trained 10–15‑person audit teams; completed full‑building audits on schedule.
• Partnered with leadership to align outcomes with compliance standards.

• Supervised 15 associates; raised order accuracy and shortened turnaround.
• Built a bench through coaching; three promotions within 12 months.

When a cluster-wide power loss struck during my shift, I served as the primary point of contact with limited context from DCEO. I aligned a team of 9 technicians on an unfamiliar task, coordinated with upper management, and led a manual sweep of every rack and host to verify power and stability. Built a live data sheet to track issues in real time, escalated findings to DCEO, and ensured clear reporting to district-level leadership. The 3-hour effort prevented host outages, enabled rapid root-cause isolation, and earned recognition from senior leadership for decisive crisis management.

Problem: agent outage across fleet degrading automation and monitoring.
Action: drove comms cadence; applied staged mitigations and selective rollbacks; aligned owners; updated SOPs/runbooks.
Result: fleet stabilized; recovery verified with dashboards; SOP updates reduced time‑to‑mitigation for similar incidents.