Steve Macbeth

Leading AI-first transformation across Amazon's retail engineering organization while directing Engineering, PM, and UX teams for Consumer Electronics Tech (consumer electronics, software, and games on Amazon.com). Authored the AI Builder framework, a structural thesis redefining how engineering organizations build software when AI automates the middle of the development lifecycle. Piloted small, high-velocity AI-first pods (2-3 builders) achieving output equivalent to traditional 8-person teams. Created the culture that produced the most-loved GenAI assistant at Amazon, at its peak used by 1 in 4 Amazonians across hundreds of use cases. Also leading teams building next-generation immersive shopping experiences and worldwide programs for affordability (installments, renewed, trade-in) and product protection.

Led engineering teams building the platform and experiences powering the Facebook Assistant across Meta's AR/VR hardware portfolio (Quest, Ray-Ban Stories, Portal), enabling natural interaction with the devices and software of the Metaverse. Built and shipped the third-party voice and presence platform for Meta's wearable ecosystem, enabling external developers to build voice-enabled and socially connected experiences. Drove cross-organizational technical planning for the developer ecosystem across the full wearable device portfolio.

I work in the Business Applications Group bringing the power of Mixed Reality (3D, AR, and Spatial Understanding) to our Enterprises customers and developers through our low code application development platform (PowerApps, Flow, PowerBI, AI Builder). We help businesses accelerate digital transformation by building applications that can understand reality and deliver context-based experiences that are both automated and augmented, revolutionizing business processes, accelerating decision-making, and increasing confidence of employers and employees. Our work is at the intersection of Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Sensors, and IoT.

I work in the Business Applications Group building Mixed Reality Applications for Enterprises. We help businesses accelerate digital transformation by building applications that can understand reality and deliver context-based experiences that are both automated and augmented, revolutionizing business processes, accelerating decision-making, and increasing confidence of employers and employees. Our work is at the intersection of Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Sensors and IoT. We are hiring engineers of all levels that want to be part of an inclusive, high empathy and execution focused team.

I co-founded the Loop Studio with my partner Lawrence Ripsher, a new startup group within Microsoft focused on incubating products, modern engineering approaches, and cultural transformation. Loop was a unique and highly rewarding experience within Microsoft where we were given a high degree of autonomy to explore this mission. On the product front, we have incubated a large number of very successful and diverse products over a short three year period, including the following products: * Next Lock Screen. #1 ranked "lock screen" in the Android Play store * Arrow Launcher (Microsoft Launcher). #1 ranked "Launcher" in the Android Play Store (4M+ downloads, 4.3 stars) * A contextual platform to enable mobile application developers on iOS & Android to efficiently build "smart applications." This platform was used to power the Next Lock Screen, the Arrow Launcher and the "mobile, contextual advertising platform" * A mobile, contextual advertising platform that augmented Bing's existing keyword-based advertising offerings with mobile advertising capabilities based on contextual signals * A video analytics platform that leverages state-of-the-art computer vision technology to generate insights from networked video cameras. We have built a showcase application for intelligent transportation planning in partnership with the City of Bellevue leveraging this platform On the cultural front, we were able to create an oasis of the Microsoft aspire-to culture by embracing psychological safety and mindfulness to build a place where people could show up as their true self and be their best self. My role focused primarily on strategy, Android development, and overall systems architecture. I was fortunate to have a hands-on role spending most days coding and designing products. However, I am most proud of the work I did to recruit, grow and lead this unique organization.

Drove strategic pivot within Microsoft to leverage our online service assets to enable intelligent services to power differentiated experiences in Windows Phone, Xbox, Windows and Office. Recently we delivered Voice Search on Xbox, Voice & Local Search on Windows Phone and rewrote the core algorithms to dramatically improve app search & discoverability on Windows Phone. I collaborate with groups across Microsoft to bring the best of knowledge, intelligence, geo-spatial, augmented reality and natural user interfaces to all developers, applications and devices. I manage a small multidisciplinary team (pm, engineering, research, design) focused on strategy and incubation projects leveraging advanced technology in personal cloud, structured data, personalization, recommendations, machine learning & agents. Co-founder of schema.org initiative in partnership with Google, Yahoo, Yandex and Baidu. I have driven broad awareness of schema.org within Microsoft and across the broader online services industry.

Responsible for making sure that everything that shows up on Bing is relevant, high quality and fast. The relevance team is responsible for knowing about trillions of web-pages, crawling billions, creating a lighting fast index that can serve the freshest and most relevant results for our users. We also built the infrastructure that enabled hundred of engineers to experiement and innovate on core relevance at scale. We were able to catch Google on core relevance with a much smaller team and with a signficinant data scale disadvantage. My work included founding the schema.org initiative to accelerate adoption of structured data by publishers and the invention of new mechanisms to bind apps/actions to entities in order to enable linking of actions in the way the web enables linking of content.

I worked in Beijing, China managing Bings first global product development team. We were focused on developing Internet-scale search services in the areas of core search relevance, structure data, news & image search as well as core operations, compute and data infrastructure. I had responsibility for managing the China, Japan and Korean search markets.

Technical advisor and business manager for Kai-Fu Lee, in the Natural Interactive Services Division. I drove strategic planning for next generation computing systems leveraging natural language, speech recognition and activity-based user interfaces. Lead a one year project to consolidate Microsoft's company wide investment in help and assistance technology, forming a new 150 person group that delivers to Windows Client/Server, Office, MSDN, Product Support and Visual Studio.

Managed the Program Management group that built supportability infrastructure for Microsoft Windows. During this time I was responsible for re-evaluating the companies strategy around supportability infrastructure and enablement in the Windows Operating System, and worked with a number of other senior staff members on a committee chaired by Steve Balmer to address customer satisfaction related to Windows supportability.

Embarke increases engagement and revenue for marketers by automatically delivering messages when each individual user is most likely to engage, and with content they are most likely to engage with. Facebook, Google, and Amazon have built detailed profiles about all of us. They do this so they can increase engagement and revenue. Embarke brings this hyper-personalization to the 40% of marketers that don't have the human resources, know-how, or time to manage their own customer data.

ThinkCX (was Vision 49) is a technology company focused on creating innovative solutions for the customer care industry. We are currently operating in stealth mode!

As a principal founder of PCsupport.com I was involved in all aspects of designing, building and growing the company. My primary responsibilities included the technical vision and development of our products, and the delivery of our support services. Tactical responsibilities included contract negotiations and management, professional services, HR, sales support, and strategic planning.

As a founding partner of Riptide Technologies I was involved in all aspects of starting and growing a successful technology consulting company. My primary responsibilities included the evaluation and investigation of product ideas, the day-to-day management of all product development staff, as well as the day-to-day management of the Consulting division of Riptide, which specialized in outsourced development contracts with Silicon Valley Fortune 500 companies.

T-III was a division of MPR Teltech that developed and marketed Microsoft Windows-based Real Estate information systems. I was responsible for the technical and personnel management of a team of developers working on server and infrastructure components used to build application software. During my time at T-III I contributed, as the principal software architect, to redesigning the application architecture to better leverage MS technologies and the Internet.

HealthVISION develops, implements and services Healthcare informatics systems to large Canadian, European and US hospitals, clinics and HMO's. My responsibilities included the management of a team of developers, providing an interface between the development and implementation groups, and designing a new client/server architecture based on Microsoft's Component Object Model.

Work with local small businesses on programming and system administration contracts.