Jason Lowden

Developer Productivity

• Led observability and remediation re-design for on-prem hardware by leveraging OpenTelemetry, Chronosphere, and PagerDuty solutions for a team of 5 engineers. Common issues were automatically remediated in minutes. Incident response time dropped from many hours to less than 5 minutes, often times not needing an engineer to be engaged. Cost savings was estimated to be approx. $100K/year.
• Mentored junior hardware engineers on observability best practices
• Co-owned Cruise Release Platform that integrated with Harness for app deployments. Provided white glove support for onboarding cloud services and general support for any issues.

Fleet Efficiency (Cloud Services)

• Led metrics migration from DataDog to Chronosphere and collaborated with other members of the Fleet org to reduce duplicated efforts
• Contributed to the scaling efforts of various fleet services and tools to support massive expansion (from 100 AVs to over 3000 AVs)
• Served as the technical lead for in-facility navigation tooling in collaboration with a cross-functional group ranging from ML engineers, TPMs, PMs, and systems engineering.
• Identified improvements to on-call practices that reduced incidents from more than 100/week to less than 10/week
• Mentored junior and senior engineers on development and operational best practices
• Conducted numerous senior/staff level interviews to support the growing organizational charter

Microsoft Whiteboard

• Led a team of 7 engineers and managed 5 direct reports
• Served as the technical lead for the design and execution of all major service features, including data locality, scalability, reliability, data migration, security improvements, and process automation.
• Identified and resolved high priority security, compliance, and privacy need-to-know (NTK) incidents while providing guidance to prevent future incidents
• Reduced monthly Azure subscription costs by over 30% via database query optimization
• Delivered a CDN-based hosting solution that enabled the web client team to provide Microsoft Whiteboard to various organizations, including US government customers
• Led the services team in on-call engineering improvements that reduced the volume of paging incidents from many per day to less than 1 per week, resulting in a 50% decrease in the number of engineers on-call at any given time
• Facilitated cross-functional collaboration by leading monthly service reviews across the entire Whiteboard organization
• Implemented bi-weekly postmortem reviews for all high severity incidents across the Whiteboard organization to increase incident awareness
• Mentored a team of engineers with little experience developing cloud based services
• Heavily involved in recruiting and interviewing for both the services team and the greater Whiteboard organization

Azure Sphere

• Contributed to major features/projects to prepare the product for General Availability to increase the demand of the product from thousands of devices to billions of devices by meeting internal Microsoft Security and Compliance requirements
• Led the effort to use client-side aggregated metrics in all microservices to gain insights into service health when running at high scale for load testing and routine production monitoring
• Leveraged intellectual curiosity to analyze logs and metrics to identify gaps in monitoring profiles to identify errors in production services
• Gathered requirements, defined the design, and led the implementation of moving subscription resources to a more secure environment with limited outage time for customers
• Involved in many design reviews throughout the team to provide design guidance and feedback regarding scalability and long term maintainability of the microservices

UST StoreCore Marketplace Services

• Intimately involved in the design implementation of the current and next version fulfillment services to handle the provisioning of products purchased through any Microsoft store front, including Windows 7/8/10 and Xbox
• Involved in the delivery of the multimillion-dollar service to provision Azure Reserved Instances for commercial customers
• Implemented Continuous Deployment into the development pipeline to reduce the manual complexity of deploying to testing and production environments
• Served as a primary point of contact for all digital fulfillment and licensing services during the two week on-call rotations to provide immediate support for customer impact livesite issues
• Served as a required code reviewer for all team code reviews

Windows NEXT: Reach

• Gathered customer requirements, designed new features, and led the development of the Windows Shell Contact Card, with the most notable feature of adding an organizational chart view with an on-time delivery and high quality,
• Performed all aspects of software engineering, starting with project definition, architectural design, implementation, and servicing of the People application and operating system components that ships as an in-box experience the Windows operating system
• Involved in a product-wide redesign effort of a contact card that started with design/UX inception and delivered a developer design specification for the entire feature

WIndows Phone CXE

• Fixed ship blocking bugs for Windows Phone 8.1 related to calling and messaging to meet OEM requirements for improving Windows Phone market share
• Improved the reliability and coverage of unit tests in the appropriate areas
• Designed, implemented, and validated OEM requirements for messaging features such as CMAS messaging in Spanish and SMS port interception