Nov 2023 – Present · 2 yrs 5 mos

• Generative AI @ scale

Aug 2017 – Nov 2023 · 6 yrs 3 mos

• I lead a team defining, implementing, and evangelizing infrastructure components on Kubernetes that runs Azure Cognitive Services. My team of niche engineers build several horizontally applicable service components that allowed all types of AI inferencing workloads to scale and turn profitable. Azure Speech Services, for example, handles more than 40 million hours of audio/month, utilizing over 10,000s of nodes globally, in 26+ countries, across seven continents, in multiple Azure clouds including on-premise, Republic of China and for the United States Government.
• I led the high availability of Azure Cognitive Services architecture and guided the team.
• I helped customers around the world architect multi-million dollar mission-critical solutions.

Sep 2010 – Aug 2017 · 6 yrs 11 mos

• Senior Engineering Manager, Speech Services
• Worked in Microsoft's Speech Services team within the AI & Research group, leading architecture and technical strategy for the core cloud speech platform. Designed a plugin-based pipeline framework enabling global collaboration across teams. Key contributions include:
• A patented feature for seamless integration of on-device and cloud speech recognition in Cortana.
• A high-performance, host- and protocol-agnostic web server with middleware support.
• A cloud-based, unsupervised speech arbitrator built in collaboration with researchers, leveraging user correction logs.
• Senior Software Engineer
• Worked on the Bing Platform team, delivering Conversational Understanding as a cloud service for Microsoft and third-party developers. Contributed to the creation of Microsoft’s intelligent service fabric, Merino, with a focus on the Speech Engine:
• Helped enable WebSocket protocol support across Bing services.
• Rewrote major components of the Speech Engine for flexibility and improved testability.
• Redesigned APIs to expose advanced speech features (e.g., confusion network, lattice, speech hypothesis), enhancing latency and user experience.
• Senior Software Engineer
• Served as one of two development leads for the next-generation Windows 8 activation system at Microsoft, providing architectural leadership and driving major technical decisions in a global team.
• Designed and deployed globally scalable, fault-tolerant RESTful APIs for Windows activation.
• Enhanced code quality and agility by introducing design patterns and modularizing the codebase for isolated feature releases.
• Built a scalable, composable UX framework with RBAC security, distributed communication, exception handling, and caching support.
• Resolved critical WCF, Entity Framework, and infrastructure performance issues (IPsec, global traffic managers).
• Championed early adoption of Windows Azure services.
• Led integrations with SAP systems via BizTalk and SAP PI/OER.