People Spotlight: Meet Anirban Basak

Our People Spotlight series gives you an inside look at our technical experts around the world. This week, we are highlighting an electrical engineer in our data center team from our Buildings + Places business in the United Kingdom and providing an insight into their inspiration and work. 

Anirban Basak joined AECOM over a decade ago in 2012. He is an Uptime Accredited Tier Designer for our data center team in London and is focused on data centers and mission critical projects in the sector. He is responsible for designing resilient systems such as electrical systems, life safety and ancillary services and EPMS monitoring topology, and optimizing energy efficiency in data center design. This includes designating benchmarks and overseeing the installation and commissioning of projects through construction phases.

Tell us about what inspired you to join the industry.

A career in engineering always felt to be on the cards for me, since I come from a family of engineers. However, most of my family has worked in civil and mechanical engineering, so my decision to focus on electrical engineering was going against the mould. From a young age, I have enjoyed problem-solving and taking apart and rebuilding things like circuit boards to understand how they work. 

This led to me pursuing a degree in electrical engineering at university. After obtaining my master’s degree, I decided to focus on implementation rather than research and development. I was really interested in making designs work well.  

Working in the data centre field was a natural progression in my career, as it provides the technical challenge that I thrive on and the opportunity to work on more intense engineering aspects within the mission critical sector.  

As most engineers will appreciate, the sector provides the opportunity to implement engineering-first principles in developing appropriate bespoke solutions. It also tests your problem-solving skills.

What is your favorite AECOM project that you’ve worked on and why? 

One of the best things about working at AECOM is the opportunity to work on global projects, ensuring a diverse and varied professional experience.  

Our data centre team is truly a global operation. Through AECOM’s Centres of Excellence program, I have had the opportunity to work closely with colleagues in India, Ireland, Romania, Spain, Germany, Greece and South Africa who bring their own wealth of knowledge and expertise. Our Centres of Excellence allow us to share knowledge and best practice to inform projects around the world. This ensures our designs are both cutting edge, and consistent throughout the region. 

My favorite projects include major hyperscale projects in the Nordics, Iberia and South Asia. These projects provide the opportunity to tackle the issue of data management and storage specific to each country. Beyond the sheer scale and technological requirements that these projects entail, they provide the opportunity to work and travel internationally with a team that always supports knowledge sharing and curiosity.  

On these projects, I have worked with local design guidelines that differ from standard practice. This means you are on a very fast paced learning curve to get up to speed and you will need to accommodate for different impacts to your design. For example, your design needs to consider the local environmental conditions and guidelines set by the local code and you will need to coordinate with colleagues from various disciplines, such as civils, architecture and telecommunications. These projects also provide opportunities to engage with local manufacturers and vendors to ensure specification of the right materials.  

From a technical perspective, it was great to be able to contribute to projects with all these challenges while successfully meeting the design criteria, project deadlines and planning requirements. It has also been a good experience to see the model built on site after meticulously drafting the whole project in 3D using Revit. 

Tell us a story of how your work positively impacted the community.  

Working within the data centre sector, you do feel you are positively impacting a worldwide challenge in terms of data management and storage.  

It can be challenging to tackle the transfer and use of the energy generated for these projects to address the issue of energy requirements for data centres. Designing and implementing a highly resilient electrical infrastructure entails the usage of an efficient system that is highly sustainable, including improving the overall efficiency and decreasing the energy quotient to 1.0, thereby helping to reduce the power consumption and energy costs. The opportunity to do this is what makes working in this sector feel important and worthwhile. 

You can also directly see how our work is positively impacting the communities in which we are working. Adapting the usage of highly efficient generator engines with HVO100 fuel significantly reduces the nitrous oxide and carbon oxide emissions levels. It is a great example of how we are transforming and integrating new technologies which are at the forefront of engineering development.

Share a piece of career advice.

Working within the mission critical sector provides the opportunity to work with incredibly inspiring like-minded colleagues who all value the detail, diligence, complexity and specialist aspects of the work which sometimes others might not understand. My career advice would be: 

• Absorb as much information as possible. 
• Have patience. 
• Don’t get overwhelmed. 
• Be a sponge and put your problem solving and analytics skills to the best use.