Life as an engineer at Microsoft Ireland

Roger: When people ask me what kind of engineers work at Microsoft, my first instinct is to say “the best engineers”. I know I’m biased, but they are all super smart, passionate and driven to solve problems for our customers.

We have big teams and small teams, focusing on different areas. There are a number of Teams in the broader Microsoft 365 domain that build and support the Microsoft 365 products you probably use every day. We have a number of teams working in the Cloud with Azure, particularly in customer reliability engineering. There’s the Core Platform Engineering team and the Cognition team.

Within these teams there are software engineers, Site Reliability Engineers, Program Managers, Data Scientists and Designers, to name a few. These different disciplines work together to take a customer problem, shape it into a solution, build it and release it.

The culture of Microsoft Ireland is one of dynamic learning. We look for people who want to learn constantly. Of course, we also look for a solid technical foundation, but if we dig a little deeper, our people have to be problem solvers. We live by the growth mindset, we question everything. It's okay to try something new in a different way. Failing fast is not failure. It's learning.

We want people who apply problem solving techniques in innovative ways. People who think about the scenarios their customers find themselves as much as the code they write. Finally, we look for collaborators. It takes many people to build a successful product. We’re in this together.

We’ve built a really strong community here in Dublin. We’re diverse and inclusive. Everyone works together. Everyone’s opinion is valid. It doesn't matter if you're Satya or if you're the intern that's just joined the team two days ago, your opinion is as important to us as the next person.

Events like our hackathons and tech talks give our teams the chance to work with and learn from people with different skillsets and levels of experience. Clubs like the Data Science Club and The Open Source Club give people the opportunity to get together and get involved in things that might not be directly related to their day job.

We give people the freedom to experiment. If the experiment is successful, the solution that is developed could make it to market, just like the Microsoft Editor web extension. This project started as part of a hackathon just over a year ago and was built from the ground up by five engineers in Dublin.

Now the Edge and Chrome extension helps people to write well on sites like LinkedIn, Yammer and Twitter. With more people working from home and communicating online, across more platforms than ever before, this could not have launched at a better time.

We’re building an environment that is the best possible base for our teams to build their careers, drive innovation and ultimately achieve the company’s mission of empowering people and organisations to achieve more. To achieve that, our innovations are always targeted at high-impact customer problems.

We have so much expertise here in Ireland; having the Microsoft Ireland sales and marketing division, digital sales, data centres, the operations teams as well as our Development Center is what makes Microsoft Ireland unique. Each of those individual businesses have touchpoints with our partners, customers and the local ecosystem. So, when we come together as One Microsoft, we can create some really impactful solutions.