David Mills

Background

About David 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 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.