Jesse Squire

Principal Software Engineering Manager

location logo Edmonds, WA • email logo jesse [dot] squire [at] gmail [dot] com • LinkedIn logo LinkedIn • GitHub logo GitHub
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Summary

Accomplished technical professional with more than twenty-five years of diverse experience in various roles involving the architecture, development, delivery, and management of software products and the teams that deliver them.

Recognized as one of Microsoft’s experts in Azure Messaging client patterns and a leader in cross-language SDK development. Authored and led libraries that serve as foundational components for Microsoft products and services including Azure, Xbox, Microsoft 365, and Dynamics, as well as major partners including OpenAI. Engineering owner of the official OpenAI SDK for .NET. Work spans messaging and distributed systems, AI-driven developer tooling, and strategic leadership across Microsoft and the open-source ecosystem.

  • Azure Messaging expertise: Engineering lead for the Service Bus, Event Hubs, Event Grid, and Schema Registry libraries, driving hands-on implementation in .NET and guiding cross-language efforts in Python, JavaScript, Java, Go, C++, and Rust.

  • Ecosystem impact: My work enables critical workloads across Microsoft and major partners including OpenAI, delivering the reliability and performance required at hyperscale.

  • AI-driven innovation: Created an AI-driven issue triage and assistance platform, adopted division-wide as a foundation for broader internal tooling. Leading development of agentic AI tooling used across Microsoft for SDK creation.

  • Leadership and open source: Engineering Manager for the official OpenAI SDK for .NET and active leader in the open-source community, shaping SDK standards and mentoring engineers across teams.

Skills

Leadership and Strategy

  • Engineering management and mentorship. (globally distributed teams)

  • Cross-language SDK program leadership. (.NET, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, Go, C++, Rust)

  • AI strategy for developer tooling: evaluating where AI adds value, guiding integration into SDK workflows, and shaping intelligent developer experiences.

  • Open-source governance and community engagement.

  • Driving organizational alignment around distributed systems and developer platforms.

Technical Expertise

  • Programming and scripting
    • Primary: C# / .NET
    • Skilled: JavaScript / TypeScript, SQL, HTML, CSS, Bash, PowerShell
    • Familiar: Python, C/C++, Ruby, Java
    • Exposure: Rust, Go

  • AI and developer tooling: Large Language Models (LLMs), Generative AI, OpenAI API, Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, Model Context Protocol (MCP), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), agentic workflows, persistent agents, AI-assisted coding

  • Platforms: Microsoft Azure, Windows, Linux, macOS, Xbox

  • Distributed systems and architecture: Event-driven architecture, Microservices, CQRS, Domain-Driven Design (DDD), Eventual Consistency

  • Messaging and data: AMQP, REST APIs, Event Hubs, Service Bus, Kafka, SQL Server, Cosmos DB, MongoDB

  • DevOps and observability: CI/CD, Git/GitHub, cloud-native monitoring

Experience

Microsoft

Principal Software Engineering Manager, CoreAI Developer Experience
Sept 2022 – Present (Remote)

As engineering manager for the CoreAI Cloud and Tools team, I lead a globally distributed group producing libraries and tooling used by millions of developers across third-party applications and internal Microsoft products and services. I set strategy, partner with service teams, and balance hands-on technical depth with people leadership.

My primary focus is the .NET developer experience, with cross-language engineering oversight for product verticals including Azure Messaging and AI-driven developer tools. As a member of technical leadership, I contribute to cross-product architecture and strategy for the Azure MCP server, Azure Developer CLI, and agentic tooling for library creation. I help drive and facilitate the process and governance that Azure service teams follow to ship their SDK libraries.

Key areas of impact:

  • Azure Messaging leadership: Engineering lead for messaging SDKs across .NET, Python, JavaScript, Java, Go, C++, and Rust, defining architecture, ensuring cross-language consistency, and establishing a developer-first design.

  • Notable technical contributions: Authored and maintained Event Hubs and Service Bus .NET libraries, which are foundational to Azure services, Microsoft workloads (Xbox, M365, Dynamics), and large portions of OpenAI’s infrastructure.

  • OpenAI SDK ownership: Engineering owner of the official OpenAI SDK for .NET, shaping technical strategy, developer experience, and community engagement, while contributing hands-on. The library powers experiences for OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, and Foundry services, and is leveraged extensively by Copilot integrations across Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, the CLI, and the GitHub coding agent.

  • AI developer tooling: Spearheading the agentic tooling that Azure service teams use to create and refine their libraries. This includes persistent agents that auto-generate code, detect and fix errors in real time, and leverage MCP and RAG to weave documentation and context into the workflow.

  • Azure AI Foundry advisory: Serve as technical advisor for the Azure AI Foundry SDK experience, including Azure OpenAI, AI Projects, the Agent Service, and the Foundry portal. The Foundry team owns their SDK packages; I provide expertise in API design, developer experience patterns, code review, and the shared infrastructure their packages are built on.

  • Division-wide innovation: Created an AI-driven issue triage, categorization, and assistance platform at Microsoft. This platform was adopted division wide as the foundation for a larger Developer Division internal offering.

Senior Software Engineer, Azure Developer Experience
Mar 2019 – Aug 2022 (Remote)

I joined the Azure SDK initiative at its inception, helping to solve one of Microsoft’s most persistent platform problems: fragmented, inconsistent developer experience across hundreds of Azure services.

As a software engineer on the Azure SDK for .NET team, I designed and delivered Azure client libraries with a focus on hands-on implementation. I led Azure Messaging libraries across languages, defining architecture, guiding features, and ensuring alignment with overall messaging priorities. I was the primary developer of the Event Hubs .NET library and a contributor across multiple Azure SDKs, while championing developer usability and partnering with service teams.

Key areas of impact:

  • Cross-language leadership: Directed design and implementation of Azure Messaging SDKs across .NET, Python, JavaScript, and Java, ensuring a consistent developer experience.

  • Deep technical contributions: Designed and implemented the Event Hubs .NET client library, including high-throughput publishing, partition management, and checkpointing for mission-critical workloads.

  • Service and developer alignment: Acted as liaison to Azure Messaging service teams to set priorities and ensure SDKs supported evolving scenarios; helping to shape the modern Azure SDK guidelines still used today.

  • Mentorship and collaboration: Guided engineers across teams and languages, fostering alignment on architecture and best practices for distributed systems and SDK design.

Senior Software Engineer, Commercial Software Engineering
Oct 2017 – Feb 2019 (Remote)

As a senior software engineer on the Commercial Software Engineering team, I partnered directly with Microsoft’s enterprise customers to deliver solutions on Azure, Xbox, HoloLens, Windows, and Linux. The role required balancing technical depth with customer engagement, adapting to diverse tools and environments to solve business problems, influence outcomes, and ensure successful adoption of Microsoft platforms.

Mimeo

Principal Software Engineering Lead
Apr 2016 – Sept 2017 (Remote)

As engineering lead for the Product Technology team (10 engineers), I managed a geographically distributed team while contributing hands-on to architecture and implementation. I partnered with product management to plan and deliver business value, improved technical stack and processes across the company, and drove creation of shared services and libraries for cross-team use. I also supported executive product pitches and reviews as a technical expert.

Microsoft

Senior Technical Program Manager, 343 Industries
Sept 2013 – Apr 2016 (Redmond, WA)

As a Technical Program Manager on the Halo services team (~70 engineers), I designed and delivered large-scale RESTful services supporting core gameplay and companion experiences, with scalability needs of over one million concurrent users and thousands of requests per second. I partnered with game designers and technical leads to define opportunities for service integration, created specifications and API contracts, and drove adoption of services across Halo titles and other Microsoft Studios teams.

Key accomplishments:

  • Designed and implemented Halo 5’s dedicated server integration with the Xbox Live cloud platform.

  • Owned mission-critical services for Halo 5: Guardians.

  • Accountable for all services for Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Halo Channel from concept through delivery.

  • Architected and managed the implementation and delivery of services for all Halo mobile titles leading into Halo 5.

  • Coordinated cross-title reward systems across all Halo properties (2014–2015).

JBS Custom Software Solutions

Software Architect
Jun 2011 – Aug 2013 (Remote)

Hands-on leadership for the design, architecture, implementation, and delivery of client solutions; designed reusable services/components; developed enterprise architecture; partnered with business stakeholders.

Earlier Career (1998 – 2011)

Software engineering, architecture, and leadership roles across small to mid-size companies and large enterprises including Bristol-Myers Squibb, Spencer Gifts, MicroWarehouse, and Harte-Hanks. Work spanned enterprise systems, e-commerce, distributed architectures, messaging platforms, and leadership of engineering teams. Full history available on LinkedIn.

Projects

Microsoft Azure SDK
2019 – Present · GitHub

The Microsoft Azure software development kit (SDK) is a set of open-source libraries and tools for developers to build applications on the Azure platform. Their goal is to provide a development experience that is intuitive, approachable, and which has been designed around real-world scenarios. Use of an SDK will look and feel consistent with the language and technology stack that an application is built on, and the API should clearly express the intent of the developer with minimal ceremony and boilerplate code. A common design is maintained across the SDKs, so that those using multiple languages or technology stacks can leverage the Azure SDK in a familiar way.

OpenAI SDK for .NET
2025 – Present · GitHub

The OpenAI SDK for .NET is the official client library for developers building applications on the OpenAI platform using .NET. It provides a first-class, idiomatic .NET experience for interacting with OpenAI services, including models for natural language processing, code generation, and image generation. The SDK emphasizes clarity, consistency, and ease of use, allowing developers to quickly integrate OpenAI capabilities into applications with minimal ceremony or boilerplate. As the engineering lead, I own end-to-end strategy, implementation, and community engagement for the SDK.

Numeric Tic-Tac-Toe
2025 – Present · GitHub

Numeric Tic-Tac-Toe is a strategic variant of the classic Tic-Tac-Toe game that replaces traditional X’s and O’s with numbers. Beyond the game itself, this project serves as a playground for trying out new ideas and stretching into areas that I don’t always get to explore in day-to-day work such as low-level optimizations in .NET, applying modern language features efficiently, AI-assisted development, and different UI flow and patterns.

Awards and Recognition

Title Credits:

  • Halo 5: Guardians
  • Halo 5: Forge
  • Halo: The Master Chief Collection
  • Halo: Spartan Strike
  • Halo Channel

Special Thanks:

  • Gears of War: Ultimate Edition (343 Industries Services Team)
  • Gears of War 4 (as 343 Section 3 Services Team)

Education

Stockton University
B.S. Computer Science