Heather Mills Email and Phone Number
Redmond, WA, US
Heather Mills's Location
Las Vegas, Nevada, United States, United States
About Heather Mills
Ruthlessly curious, passionate, people-focused leader, software developer, and systems architect with deep experience designing, building, operating, optimizing, and debugging end-to-end systems to deliver on short-term business needs while aligning technical details with big-picture long-term goals.Experience includes:* Envisioning, designing, and leading the evolution of Microsoft's two decade-old Windows validation platform into a composable, cloud-based, OS-agnostic platform.* Building auto-triage and rich failure investigation capabilities that enabled 8K+ engineers to remotely leverage 15K+ physical devices & 80K+ virtual machines to efficiently evaluate and improve the quality of unstable operating systems running on potentially unstable hardware (e.g. Xbox, HoloLens, IoT Devices, PCs, datacenter hardware).* Driving device stability through a collaborative, cross-company approach that broke down barriers, delivered the most stable Windows Phone ever, and enabled identification & resolution of unexpected device restarts on customers' devices. Success depended on quickly shifting between roles including program manager, debug analyst, and dev architect.* Founding team member, service architect, and lead DevOps engineer for the foundation that now powers much of Microsoft 365. From inception to 20M+ provisioned Exchange mailboxes, responsibilities included network design, hardware selection, designing minimally invasive production debugging systems, and driving the Exchange product group to embrace DevOps & Testing in Production mindsets.* Supporting Microsoft's largest Exchange & Outlook customers, simultaneously managing executive-level customer communications, live debugging of production environments, developing advanced debugging tools, and driving fixes with product groups.* Designing and building out Juniper Networks' worldwide IT systems during their rapid, world-wide growth from 200 to 2,000 employees.* Leveraging 10+ years of remote work experience to mentor teams for improved productivity and reduced stress during COVID-19.Key Values:* Never. Stop. Learning.* Be wrong when you are wrong.* Grow people and teams.* Obsess over customers.* Focus. Measure & deliver what matters.* Keep things simple. Think about the future, but not too much.* Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Not just technology, but patterns and principles too.* Be lazy. Relentlessly drive efficiency in systems and processes.* Diverse people working together deliver success. Soft skills are hard. Understand and value peoples' differences.
Heather Mills's Current Company Details
Heather Mills Work Experience Details
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Principal Software EngineerMojang StudiosRedmond, Wa, Us
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Software Engineer - Reality LabsMeta Jul 2022 - PresentMenlo Park, Ca, Us -
Principal Systems & Software ArchitectMicrosoft Apr 2020 - Jun 2022Redmond, Washington, UsAs the dev architect for the Azure Edge + Platform Engineering Systems Test Automation Platform (TAP) team I have:* Defined and drove execution of a phased North Star vision to evolve Microsoft's current OS validation platform into an intelligent cloud / intelligent edge, OS agnostic, multi-tenant solution for distributed validation of operating systems, cloud services, and devices. The North Star document, co-authored with program management, was praised for its strong future-looking vision, has brought clarity & energy to the team, and continues to provide a foundation for key decisions & collaborative investments with partner teams across Microsoft.* Continuously engaged across Microsoft to align my team's investments with evolving business & product priorities, ensuring that we "lay the tracks" to enable engineers to efficiently deliver high quality products in areas ranging from Azure infrastructure to pre-production devices like HoloLens 2 or the latest Surface.* Identified and drove a cross-team initiative to align OS validation workloads with Azure Compute Host OS quality efforts to deliver Azure features faster while improving the quality of the OS that powers the Azure fleet.* Built and maintained relationships across Microsoft to eliminate duplicative investments and align validation platform use-cases with external customer scenarios to maximize customer value and partner team engagement.* Collaborated with hardware & firmware experts to define standards for physical device automation that enable compliant, unmodified retail devices to be used for fully automated validation of many different potentially unstable OS images each day.* Mentored diverse engineers with a focus on increasing the senior talent diversity, breaking down barriers for new team members, and encouraging all engineers to provide their unique perspective on the big pciture. -
Principal Software EngineerMicrosoft Aug 2017 - Apr 2020Redmond, Washington, UsOwned key portions of the Test Automation Platform (TAP) that supports OS development scenarios ranging from 8K+ engineers' inner-loop to high-scale, lights-out automation of 15K+ physical devices & 80K virtual machines.* Improved Quality of Service (QoS) from single digits to a high of 90% and mentored an engineer that continued on to improve TAP's QoS even further.* Bootstrapped Azure Compute Host OS validation resulting in critical issues being fixed in days instead of months, reduced manual testing costs, and enabling existing Azure validation workloads to be leveraged for daily code flow decisions. * Defined and drove adoption of a device chaperone model and device under test standards to deliver simple, reliable, and scalable automation of unstable pre-release operating systems on pre-release physical devices. Benefits include TCO reduction, multi-month reduction in device on-boarding overhead, rich failure diagnostics, and a solid foundation for OS validation on any device, anywhere.* Eliminated costly randomization by proactively identifying and planning for upcoming product validation needs in areas like ARM64 and Windows 10X.* Prototyped key aspects of TAP's north star vision that leverages existing cloud-based technologies to deliver a modern operating systems validation platform while reducing TAP-owned code by multiple orders of magnitude. Other benefits include increased business continuity, security, scalability, and lowers costs.* Eliminated and transition non-core technology ownership to appropriate teams outside of TAP using a "One Microsoft" approach.* Invested in promoting Microsoft's cultural values through elimination of non-diverse terminology, mentoring diverse engineers, and increasing my self-awareness to listen more.* Continued to grow technical skills through targeted projects. Learnings were evangelized & discussed with team members, including telemetry best practices and test driven development.
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Principal Software Engineer LeadMicrosoft Dec 2016 - Aug 2017Redmond, Washington, UsFounded and led the Diagnostics and Reliability Experiences team to enable 8k+ Windows engineers to ship a higher quality product. As the lead of this team I:* Mentored my engineers in technical excellence through design & code reviews, career discussions, and various "soft" skills.* Identified level-appropriate projects and provided guidance to enable my engineers to grow and succeed in new areas. I placed a strong emphasis a "One Microsoft" approach, forming strong partnerships, and doing the right thing for Microsoft.* Focused on consistent delivery of planned work, remained flexible enough to adjust to business priorities, and learned a lot through my mistakes.* Communicated to my team and management how each iternation's work aligned with Microsoft's business priorities.My team delivered:* A comprehensive auto-triage solution for product and infrastructure failures that are common when engineering an unreliable OS on top of unreliable hardware. This solution required heavy cross-team collaboration, saved Microsoft $2M+/year, immediately increased the bug fix rate from 1% to greater than 10%, improved bug accuracy from 2% to over 50%, and laid the groundwork for future auto-triage and Quality of Service improvements. * Enabled reliable live kernel debugging and post-mortem diagnostic capabilities for in-development products, including addressing many complex Xbox-specific issues. As a result, investigation costs for related product failures was reduced by an order of magnitude while also enabling a better auto-triage signal.* Partnered with teams across Microsoft to deliver a device automation solution for the HoloLens v2 that has since become the foundation for automating all physical devices in Windows labs. Management of this project included making the difficult decision to scrap over a years' work and change direction 2 months before the required delivery date in order to deliver a more standardized, cost effective solution.
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Principal Software EngineerMicrosoft Feb 2015 - Dec 2016Redmond, Washington, UsAs a Principal Software Engineer on the Windows Engineering Systems team I:Strengthened the Team • Invested in junior and senior engineers' growth through technical & career mentoring, code reviews, and fundamental diagnostic skills training. • Assisted leadership with talent management through recruiting, interviewing, retention, and constructive perspectives to assist struggling engineers to find their path forward.Provided Technical Leadership • Drove the elimination of non-core investments, converged duplicative technologies, and worked with leadership to re-organize the team to enable greater focus and engineering efficiency. These efforts resulted in faster delivery of new capabilities to customers, cost savings exceeding $1M/year, happier team members, and a less fragmented experience for our customers. • Enabled 8K+ engineers to investigate failures more efficiently through improved post-mortem and live diagnostic capabilities. • Proactively identified and drove the redesign of a critical component to prevent wormable security flaws from shipping to customers. • Partnered with the HoloLens team to ship a higher quality product by enabling broader use of virtualization for product validation.Bootstrapped Automated Failure Triage • Enabled high quality automatic triage with a focus on differentiating between infrastructure and product failures in high-impact areas including hardware failures, OS installation, OS upgrade, and early machine configuration. By providing a clearer signal I eliminated thousands of wasted developer hours, reduced manual triage costs by $500K+/year, and prevented critical product bugs from reaching the Windows "mainline" - including some so severe that code flow would be frozen pending their resolution. • Improved the quality and depth of data emitted by test infrastructure to enable data-driven prioritization of further auto-triage improvements.
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Software Development Consultant For XamarinSelf Employed Sep 2014 - Feb 2015Assisted Xamarin at the technical and business levels with resolving blocking issues for a stalled cross-company project with Microsoft.
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Principal Software Engineer / Technical Lead - Windows PhoneMicrosoft Oct 2012 - Sep 2014Redmond, Washington, UsTechnical leader for telemetry, device stability and partner collaboration. Passionate about taking on the thorniest issues and providing a great customer experience through the use of data.* Drove high visibility cross-company stability task forces, including one that went from being behind schedule to shipping one of the most stable Windows phones ever. Responsibilities included prioritizing investigations, coordinating partner and Microsoft resources, debugging, coding fixes, and mentoring other engineers.* Enhanced on-device telemetry, cloud-based analysis and partner data sharing systems, resulting in a reduction of in-market device crashes by 80%.
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Principal Software Engineer / Program Manager - Windows PhoneMicrosoft Aug 2009 - Oct 2012Redmond, Washington, UsAddressed the most pressing telemetry and test infrastructure business needs, acting in whatever role was necessary to get the job done.- Identified and addressed major team-wide workflow inefficiencies in the use of stability telemetry, returning thousands of hours to the engineering team and receiving a special bonus and promotion as a result. * Created functional specifications for Windows Phone telemetry and test infrastructure that defined a phased, multi-release vision that has been successfully executed. * Drove sensitive business and technical issues to resolution under extreme time pressure while clearly communicating with senior management, legal and privacy representatives.* Participated as a key v-team member to implement AT&T’s MTBF certification test on an extremely tight schedule. * Designed and built major pieces of the Windows Phone 8 test infrastructure, including: - Telemetry collection and diagnostic improvements that work in the face of unstable software & hardware. - Kernel debugger automation, allowing many previously un-diagnosable issues to be resolved. - Software efficiency improvements that increased capacity by 25%.
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Senior Service Engineer & Architect - Exchange / Office 365Microsoft Dec 2006 - Aug 2009Redmond, Washington, UsTechnical Lead and Architect responsible for network architecture, representing the service in ship room, debugging live site issues with a focus on high availability, and collaborating with engineering teams to design features for the cloud.* Designed the end-to-end network architecture, including switch, router, load balancer, global traffic management, and IP address space configuration. The design met SLA and geo-redundancy requirements while addressing the challenges of storing hundreds of terabytes of data per scale unit. * Collaborated on the design, implementation and troubleshooting of automated server management, SSL certificate provisioning, DNS, Live ID (a.k.a. Microsoft account) authentication, multi-protocol load balancing, and content delivery networks.* Enabled self-service debugging for the Exchange Server team while minimizing impact on the production service, leading to faster issue resolution and increased team efficiency.* Worked closely with the Exchange High Availability feature team to design, deploy, and diagnose cloud-scale high availability solutions.
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Software Development Engineer In Test Ii - Exchange ServerMicrosoft May 2006 - Dec 2006Redmond, Washington, UsCreated and executed scalability and integration tests to identify recall-class issues in Exchange 2007 with a focus on high availability features. Drove resolution of critical issues by performing failure analysis, partnering with engineers across the Exchange product group to create fixes, and representing issues in Exchange Server ship room.* Developed specialized tests to identify and root cause more than 10 recall class bugs late in the product cycle, resulting in a high quality RTM product, special bonus and promotion.* Developed automation and tools to build out test topologies in 13 hours instead of 1 week. As a result, regressions in daily builds were quickly discovered and addressed.* Bootstrapped Exchange 2007 on pure IPv6 networks, enabling Exchange to meet government purchasing criteria.
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Escalation Engineer - Exchange ServerMicrosoft Aug 2004 - May 2006Redmond, Washington, UsResolved the thorniest Exchange Server and Outlook customer issues, including escalations from other engineers.* Managed critical situations for Microsoft’s largest customers, simultaneously performing deep debugging while communicating clearly with customers’ senior management and teams across Microsoft.* Partnered with the Exchange and Outlook product groups to implement additional diagnostics and new functionality, resolving many long-standing customer issues.* Created new tools to improve team efficiency and resolve customer issues more quickly.* Partnered with the Exchange Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) to provide great community-based support.
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Software Developer / ConsultantSelf-Employed Nov 2003 - Aug 2004Developed new functionality and re-architected portions of an Independent Software Vendor’s Exchange-based product without introducing regressions.
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It Systems ArchitectJuniper Networks Mar 1999 - Nov 2003Sunnyvale, Ca, UsArchitected, planned, and deployed Juniper's global IT infrastructure from the ground up in support of Juniper's rapid expansion from 200 employee startup to a 2,000+ employee company. * Led a global team of administrators, building out and maintaining 160 Windows and Exchange servers across 15+ sites. * Enabled fast deployment of new sites in less than 2 weeks with no travel required through aggressive use of remote administration technologies, cutting-edge site to site VPN technology to eliminate reliance on leased lines that were standard at the time, and inventory management to eliminate server ordering delays. This approach allowed the IT team to easily scale with rapid global growth.* Integrated Microsoft, FreeBSD, and Solaris systems to form a cohesive environment through standards compliant technology, tool development and driving bug fixes for RFC compliance issues into both Microsoft and open source products.* Redesigned the global corporate network for better security, reliability, functionality, and cost effectiveness.* Planned and implemented major projects, including an Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2000 upgrade, an NT 4.0 to Windows 2000 migration, an Exchange 2003 pre-release upgrade as a Microsoft Joint Development Partner, a full datacenter move, and multiple acquisitions.
Frequently Asked Questions about Heather Mills
What company does Heather Mills work for?
Heather Mills works for Mojang Studios
What is Heather Mills's role at the current company?
Heather Mills's current role is Principal Software Engineer.
Who are Heather Mills's colleagues?
Heather Mills's colleagues are Rigi Tomados, Wilko Den Otter, Afonso Constrotor, Ronald Wilson, Milos Mitic, Kika Kikic, Henrik Sävenstedt.
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