David Francis

Set technical direction for security, performance, reliability, and developer productivity across the Teams & Channels services, partnering with teams throughout Microsoft to ship at global scale.

• Drove the Secure Future Initiative (SFI) work for Teams & Channels, measurably strengthening the security posture of the service.
• Led performance initiatives that cut a core background worker’s CPU usage by over 30%, reducing instance counts by 25% and lowering compute costs.
• Partnered with the .NET team on AI-assisted upgrade tooling, compressing multi-week framework migrations into 2–3 days, and improved test infrastructure to run unit tests 40–45% faster.
• Onboarded the service to OpenTelemetry-based distributed tracing, enabling end-to-end debugging across service boundaries in collaboration with partner teams.
• Hardened reliability by expanding auto-generated infrastructure and adding PR-build checks that prevent configuration drift, plus AI “skills” that accelerate incident investigation and routine operations.
• Led the expansion of Teams & Channels into the France and Germany sovereign clouds and improved CI/CD for more consistent releases and faster dogfood validation.

Became a technical lead for Teams & Channels infrastructure and deployments, owning the reliability, cost, and security of the platform.

• Led the migration from Service Fabric to Kubernetes, reducing COGS and enabling faster deployments to new clouds.
• Drove cross-team efficiency efforts that cut compute costs by 35% and reduced infrastructure spend by seven figures annually.
• Replaced hand-maintained Azure deployments with C# code-generated ARM templates—guaranteeing consistent environments and eliminating “snowflake” resources—and moved build and release pipelines to code-generated YAML.
• Served as Security Champion for Teams & Channels and drove the identity and authentication work for Shared Channels.
• Invested in Roslyn analyzers to catch common bugs at compile time and source generators to replace error-prone hand-written code.
• Standardized TSGs and SOPs so on-call engineers had consistent, reliable documentation during incidents.

Delivered major Microsoft Teams features and became the team’s go-to expert on identity, authentication, and service architecture.

• Helped deliver Guest Access, Private Channels, and Shared Channels, collaborating across the Teams org and with the Entra identity teams to support guest access correctly throughout the Teams services.
• Became the team’s subject-matter expert on identity and authentication.
• Helped design and build the microservice architecture powering Team and Channel provisioning.
• Delivered Teams and Channels APIs to Microsoft Graph and drove the rollout of the service to the GCC and DoD government clouds.
• Led the migration of the front end from AngularJS to React for Teams and Channels and drove the initial proof-of-concept for the consumer version of Teams.
• Built tooling that made it easier for on-call engineers to investigate and mitigate production issues.

Designed, developed, and maintained software for the corporate housing industry. Built customized client solutions, modernized and maintained legacy code, and automated deployment and maintenance through scripting.

• Designed and developed server-side code, custom web applications, and DotNetNuke modules across the AAU’s sport sites and main site—including event management, user management, and PDF creation & conversion.
• Built shared class libraries used across internal and external applications, centralizing logic to reduce duplication and simplify updates.
• Reduced site complexity and put usability first in a UX-focused redesign; the new event licensing system decreased support calls by 30–40%.

• Built and tested a custom web-based management system (ASP.NET, C#, Visual Basic, SQL Server) for managing customers, employees, and vendors, helping staff, managers, and administrators work more efficiently.
• Increased customer satisfaction and remote-office efficiency by making data instantly available—requests that once took 3–5 business days now complete in under 15 minutes.
• Replaced the company’s paper file room with a web-based solution, saving over $50k annually and reducing paper use.