Entries tagged 'jobs'

  • The Microhood: Bing Geospatial team goes beyond location, location, location

    Posted Wednesday, November 09 2011 by the JobsBloggers

    By Zoe Goldring

    Another beautiful fall day is breaking in Redmond and with that comes the latest dispatch from one of our teams. This week, Harish Jayanti of the Bing Geospatial Platform team wanted to tell you more about his new team and what they are working on. Now, I am not going to be shy on my lack of knowledge of this area –this post contains a lot of engineering terms that went over my head at first. But here’s the thing about reading what Harish has to say; he exudes excitement. Excitement for the engineering problems that he tackles on a daily basis. Excitement for a problem space that he and his team gets to dig into every day. And mostly excitement for the people he spends his time with. So read along and find out what this part of the Microhood has to offer. And then decide if you want to be part of that excitement for yourself!

    Cheers,
    Zoe

    My name is Harish Jayanti and I am a development manager on the Bing Platforms team. I have been in Microsoft since 1997, building large-scale web services for Encarta.com, Virtual Earth/Bing Maps, and now Bing Platforms.

    WHAT WE DO

    The team that I manage is the Bing Geospatial Platform team. My team builds rich location and spatial services that can be used by the end-to-end Online Services Division (OSD)stack and enables relevance and engagement improvements for all location based scenarios in OSD. With the skyrocketing increase of search traffic from location-aware devices, adding powerful geospatial capabilities to the Bing Platform and making location a first-class citizen across the end-to-end Bing stack has become a top priority.

    Working in the geospatial and location-based services space is very exciting as it is a fast moving area with many interesting engineering and algorithmic challenges. Some of the problems that our engineers are currently tackling include building a robust geospatial graph containing all the entities that we know of in the physical world, deeply integrating the geospatial graph with the web graph, and building a large-scale extremely low-latency spatial search service. Writing algorithms that (a) create semantic and spatial relationships across hundreds of millions of entities and (b) query the entities and relationships with rich spatial and relational filters in a few milliseconds, requires deep knowledge in several areas of computer science. So every day at work is very intellectually rewarding for all of us.

    OUR TEAM

    We are a newly formed team with a few hand-picked rock star engineers from various parts of Bing. We have a startup culture with minimal process and management overhead. We ship updates to our production services every two weeks, using Scrum as the development process. We code primarily in C# and C++ to deliver components and web services to our customers throughout Microsoft.  Everyone writes production code and is responsible for end-to-end quality including test coverage and live site duties. As we are a platform team with SLA commitments for production services, we have a high bar for engineering fundamentals and strive to drive quality upstream as much as possible. We also focus on continuous improvement of our engineering processes with the goal of enhancing our quality and agility. Some of the key values we emphasize on our team include passion for technical growth, strong engineering fundamentals, individual accountability and responsibility, team work and mentoring, and drive for results.

    Now that you have an idea of what my team works on, I want to tell you more about the people on the team. We have a lot of fun working closely with each other, helping each other grow, and enjoying shared success. We are relatively flexible with our work schedules and let everyone manage their day-to-day work on their own and track progress on a weekly basis. We work in City Center Plaza in downtown Bellevue, so in addition to enjoying the great views, we usually go out for lunch or drinks on a regular basis to the nearby restaurants. We also take time for regular team outings – recent events include a cooking class at Kaspar’s, a Day of Caring event at The Just Garden Project in Seattle, a picnic at Chism Park, river rafting in Wenatchee river, and a hike at Tiger Mountain in Issaquah.

    WE ARE HIRING!

    Working on an exciting and challenging charter with a great team has been a lot of fun for all of us! We are looking for more world-class talent to join us and help us shape the future of Bing and advance the area of search. If you are interested, please contact us at bingjobs@microsoft.com or visit: http://bit.ly/binggeospatialjobs to view my engineering job openings.

  • The Microhood: Big data, cloud computing and a million gigs a day

    Posted Thursday, October 13 2011 by the JobsBloggers

    By Zoe Goldring

    Here at JobsBlog one of our goals is to pull back the cover on jobs at Microsoft and give you a no-holds-barred look into the lives of ‘Softies. We’re also always trying to get more first person accounts of different jobs and teams at Microsoft. It’s like getting to know all the people in our neighborhood; nay our Microhood! This week we are very lucky to have Ed Harris tell us about his job as the development manager on Bing Cosmos. What I like most about Ed’s story is that he wrote it himself. This isn’t my personal view of his job or team and gives you a really good overview of what it’s like to be part of this group. Not to mention there’s beer. Yeah, you can almost always get me reading if there’s beer involved.

    Cheers! Zoe

     
    I’m Ed Harris, a development manager on the Bing team. I’ve been at Bing since 2004, and worked on a lot of different teams – on the front-end/consumer-facing bits, deep in the platform space, and now in our infrastructure team.

    Our team’s mission is to provide the stable foundation for Bing and other online applications to run. Want to install an operating system and deploy a build on 50,000 machines with a couple of keystrokes? That’s us. Need a place to store a petabyte or two of business-critical data? That’s us too. Want to analyze every page of the web? We’ve got what you need. 

    Our team is called Cosmos. Cosmos is the cloud storage and computing environment that Microsoft’s online properties use for data storage, analytics, and “Big Data” computation. Every day, we load or generate petabytes of new data – that’s one million gigabytes per day! In the online business data is the most precious commodity of all – whether it’s our relevance experiments, our copies of the web, or a thousand other data sets that get curated - all of it is mission critical. 

    All of that is great, but the thing I enjoy most about being in the infrastructure team is the diversity of what we get to work on. To build an efficient storage engine, you need brilliant system programmers who can make the disks do amazing and unnatural things. On top of that, you have to layer data integrity – at the scale we operate we have random bits flip from zero to one or vice-versa on a regular basis. So besides being fast, the storage layer needs to constantly scrub itself. We also have folks who are world-class compression experts. To be cost effective we need to squeeze the most data possible onto the disks, but not spend too much CPU doing it. Up further in the stack is our execution and computation team. They are able to take a user query, optimize it, and schedule it to run on tens of thousands of PCs. You can write a three line query in our language (called SCOPE), that actually turns into a map/reduce job across twenty thousand servers.

    With that diversity of problem solving comes an incredible group of people. Our problem-space is on the cutting edge of cloud computing, and has attracted a group of rock-star engineers. It’s an infectiously collaborative environment, and not a day goes by when I don’t have the opportunity to learn a new technique or algorithm.

    Though we take our responsibilities very seriously as the custodians of Bing and Microsoft’s data assets - we also have a lot of fun! We take time for team events like hiking or flash-mob Frisbee as a way to get to know each other and celebrate our hard work. On a daily basis, it’s fairly common to see team members cutting loose after work – the floor reverberates on a regular basis from aggressive Kinect volleyball and dance central contests. Aside from these happenings, we also built our very own infrastructure keg fridge this year.

    It’s called the InfraKegerator and we now have three different kinds of beer and home-made root beer on tap. And because we are all geeks, we intend to fully integrate our InfraKegerator into our datacenter automation this fall. We want biometric access control so other teams don’t steal our beer, alerts to fire when the kegs run low, 24/7 temperature monitoring, and minable data on which microbrews are most popular. It’s just one of the ways that we tie together work and personal interests to create a truly amazing workplace.

    Working in this kind of environment – with a great set of hard problems to solve, a world-class group of coworkers, and a team that knows how to cut loose – this is what I love most about being at Bing. 

     

     Bing's Cosmos team is hiring software development engineers! Click here to view a list of openings with this team and find your place at Microsoft.