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10 years at Microsoft

Microsoft Human Resources just sent me a note to tell me that I reached 10y with the company!!! It only feels like it was last year that I joined 🙂

Side note for the non-Microsofties… The company counts the total number of years of service since joining, minus any “sabbatical” at another company.

I joined back in 2005. I left academia, made a huge change in my personal life, came to a new country, made new friends, and created a new home with an amazing partner. It’s been rewarding in so many ways.

I love working on tech. I’m fortunate to be surrounded by awesome people. I feel that I learn something new every day. Here’s to another 10y of building awesome stuff for our users around the world!

Just bought a pound of M&Ms for every year, as per Microsoft tradition. Drop by my office to say hi.

Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about