Hemant Kumar

Partner Group Engineering Manager, AI Platform @ Microsoft

Bellevue, Washington, United States

About

Building hyperscale AI, cloud, and distributed data platforms from 0→1 and scaling them globally. I lead Microsoft CoreAI Inferencing, a multi-geo engineering organization that powers flagship Microsoft products—including GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Copilot and LinkedIn—along with some of the world’s most innovative startups, unicorns, and thousands of enterprise customers.

Experience

  • Microsoft (Full-time · 9 yrs 7 mos)
    • Partner Group Engineering Manager (AI Platform)
      Jul 2021 - Present · 5 yrs

      • Lead the core inferencing team building the largest SaaS inference service and scaling it through exponential growth. • Drove the vision, strategy, and execution of inferencing as a SaaS offering, collaborating with internal and external stakeholders, product managers, and architects. • Partnered with product team to develop new customer offerings (Global, Data zone and regional consumption and provisioned offers more than doubling the YoY revenue) • Achieved 30% platform inference efficiency, contributing tens of millions in margin improvement highlighted in MSFT FY25 Q1 earnings through novel routing, caching and scaling (7 patents filed). • The service supports inferencing all Microsoft external customers including top AI startups as well as all Copilots (GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Copilot, M365 Copilot, Security and LinkedIn)

    • Principal Group Engineering Manager (Azure Cosmos DB)
      Dec 2016 - Jul 2021 · 4 yrs 8 mos

      • Architected and scaled Azure Cosmos DB service 100x. • Delivered compute platform for Cosmos DB service for compute-intensive, dedicated and multi-tenant workloads like gateways, caches, Mongo and Cassandra translation engines. • Developed Cosmos DB Database accelerator for ultra-low latency, cost-optimized data access. • Increased adoption of Azure Cosmos DB in F500 segment by building enterprise-grade networking and security features (PrivateLink, RBAC, Network Isolation). • Ensured customer success on Azure Cosmos DB.

  • Staff Software Engineer at Talko Inc. (Acquired by Microsoft)
    Jan 2014 - Dec 2016 · 3 yrs

    • Built core Messaging and Calling services for mobile collaboration • Service features: Sync, Push notifications, Slack integration, Web auth, Call export, User status, Service support for materialized views. • Post acquisition by Microsoft, Principal SDE (Dec 2015 - Dec 2016), built and launched Microsoft Teams

  • Microsoft (8 yrs 9 mos)
    • Senior Software Design Engineer (Azure Core)
      Jun 2010 - Jan 2014 · 3 yrs 8 mos

      Built Azure Load Balancer from ground up Designed and created Software Load Balancer (SLB) for Azure from inception to key platform enabling Azure growth. * SLB is a fully distributed system running on all nodes in Windows Azure cloud. Multiple instances of SLBs are deployed in Azure and had a combined capacity of multiple Pentabytes per second. (Description in ACM SIGCOMM 2013 paper: Ananta: Cloud Scale Load Balancing) * Invented and implemented novel mechanism to reduce data path latency by more than 50% and increase throughput by 100x for intra-region Azure traffic. (Details in section 3.2.4 of above paper.) * Scaled SLB to 50 TBps

    • Software Design Engineer (Windows Kernel, Live Mesh)
      May 2005 - May 2010 · 5 yrs 1 mo

      Built kernel/low level networking/transport features.

  • Software Engineer at Multiple startups
    Sep 1999 - Nov 2001 · 2 yrs 3 mos

    Software Developer in early-stage VoIP companies.