Getting to know datacenter employees: Rahul Dhar

Microsoft’s success depends on our people. We are proud to introduce some of the talented folks in your community who work in our global datacenters. Discover what inspired them to seek a career in the tech industry, the different pathways they pursued, and what a day in the life of a datacenter employee looks like.

Introducing Rahul Dhar

Country Director, Datacenters

New Delhi

Employee since 2014

Early days

Rahul spent his early childhood in Kashmir, a northern state of India. He was fortunate to have completed primary schooling from a prestigious institute, close to 200 years old now, where mostly British and Catholic teachers taught and created a virtual global environment. Rahul has always been fascinated with snow-clad mountains and took a lot of hiking and camping trips back then. Since settling in the New Delhi metro in 1990, he tries to go out to the nearby hill stations and take some novice photographs there.

Rahul’s family is blessed with their son Abhimanyu, who is preparing for his grade 10 board exams currently, plays keyboard and harmonium, and is a karate (Gōjū-ryū style) brown belt. Rahul’s wife Manisha is a child psychologist who is involved in psychological evaluation and counselling services.

The path to technology

Rahul is proud to be involved in building the digital infrastructure for India. In today’s digital revolution, looking at the potential penetration of telecom and digital services to the remotest parts of India, he feels we have lot of work to do together.

Rahul believes perseverance is the key to a role like this, which involves understanding many technology domains at the same time and getting these integrated together to build workable solutions to a variety of customers, ranging from tech-savvy developers to grassroot-level first-time digital service users like customers making online payments. “This feeling gives me fuel to work together with my vibrant team to build and deliver the right public cloud capacity at the right time,” says Rahul

Rahul’s inspiration is every single person in his team who delivers work practices to their best. Respect is another word which resonates in his mind when he talks about the great work culture at Microsoft CO+I.

Superpowers

In Rahul’s field, understanding the procedures and their implementation is very important. Teams can’t make a callous error as the overall uptime of the datacenter (and customer services) may be affected. So, going by the rulebook is considered pretty much without any compromise. Similarly, understanding the equipment and its functionality is important.

Above all, being a people leader, understanding a team’s concerns with open arms, is very much the key to success. Empathy lays down the path to tight relationships with teams and juniors. Microsoft’s work culture lays a lot of emphasis on diversity and inclusion and empathy. Rahul says, “Without these basic soft tools, any leader for that matter will not be able to shine. I take pride in my team and trust their actions deeply. That is my biggest superpower.”

A day in the life

Most of Rahul’s time goes into understanding the overall leadership strategy and creating plans to implement it on the floor. Teams would have questions around these plans and then he has to address them and satisfy their inquisitiveness.

The rest of the time he spends on building rapport with internal and external stakeholders to garner support from them for his teams’ cumulative success.

Favorite childhood food

Kashmiri roath

This is a traditional bakery item in Rahul’s hometown and is a handmade sweet bread with loads of milk fat and dry raisins, baked in a traditional vertical clay oven, fired by wooden charcoal.

.
.
.
.