After 3+ fun years working on Live Mesh and associated technologies, I decided it was time to go work on something a little different. In particular, I went looking for a job that allowed me to focus full-time on building technology related to data mining and machine learning. And I’m happy to say that I found a lot of interesting work being done in those areas, across multiple divisions in Microsoft.
Unfortunately, there’s only one of me, and so I had to choose a single position [this is one instance where something similar to the vaunted Google “20% time” would have been nice …]. I ended up picking a development manager role in our adCenter group, to run a team that builds the infrastructure necessary to run all the machine learning and data mining algorithms that we use to optimize the paid search ads that we show, as well as the feedback we give to advertisers to help them optimize their campaigns.
While I’m just starting to understand the space, it’s already pretty clear that this is going to be a ton of fun, since it involves both extreme scale [billions of possible ads that can be displayed, thousands of requests per sec, terabytes of data per day that need to be analyzed], very strict performance requirements [ads need to be selected in a few milliseconds], and a continuously-learning system that gets better the more data it sees. And on a less-technical note, the recently-approved Yahoo-Microsoft deal is going to make this an exciting place to be for the next few years.
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