My first article… so you have the context

Finally! I have decided to start writing about my experiences and learnings at Microsoft. My goal is twofold: to share with others as a way to advocate for a better software engineering community and environment, while I portray why I love to be at Microsoft and how it is continuously improving its internal culture.

I could not start with any other subject than Spartans.

Spartans is a really interesting team of highly talented software engineers and data scientists, and it is part of Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research (AI+R). Spartans’ role is to join temporarily to other teams within AI+R to leverage their talent to accelerate the most strategic initiatives and projects in our division. To learn more, you can check out a nice post about Spartans featured by Microsoft.

The team started as a pilot around 2013 with a handful of engineers knocking on doors of the Bing Ads Platform team to find projects. Today, the team is a well-established brand serving the AI+R division, composed of more than 20 engineers, diverse and growing, with extremely high-demand, currently deployed to several interesting projects.

This has been a great journey for me since I was one of those engineers in 2013, and now I get to lead the team. There are several great things to highlight about Spartans which will be the base for new articles: work content, culture, team charter, top integral talent, diverse & inclusive, continuous scaling efforts, high-performing team, data-driven approach to tracking success, healthy mobility to retain talent in Microsoft, excellent hiring muscle, team bonding approach, among others.

I will be sharing about all those topics in subsequent articles, and my hope is that they will be useful for colleagues in our community.

Before closing this introduction, I want to thank Spartans’ former managers: Shaiwal Singh and Alisson Sol, for their support, guidance, and mentorship. And, I want to praise our GM & Director, Maria Alvarez, for being a fan of the team and for her amazing support, advocacy, and leadership.