About

Salim Alam is a highly experienced Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft with over 30 years of relevant experience in the field. In his current role, he is responsible for performance and scalability for OneDrive and Sharepoint Online (ODSP). Salim has a proven track record of delivering innovative solutions that have resulted in significant improvements in latency and throughput. Prior to joining Microsoft, Salim served as the Principal Software Development Engineer at Chef Software, where he was responsible for technical leadership for key components of Chef Enterprise Automation Stack. He was also responsible for the planning, architecture, development, and operations for Chef Habitat Builder. Salim's accomplishments at Chef Software include revamping services that delivered 100x improvement in latency and throughput, leading cross-company efforts to track and address key technical debt, and improving CI/CD reliability. He was recognized for his contributions to service cost reduction, customer satisfaction, and outstanding contribution. He is also an active contributor to open-source projects and has over 1000 open-source commits and contributions in the last 12 months. Salim has also served as the Director of Development at Expedia, where he managed a 50-person development staff in Lodging Search and Booking (US/India/China). He was responsible for achieving and maintaining 99.9% site availability (100M+ requests/day) and speeding up release cadence by 50% with new agile practices. He also delivered a new inventory pipeline that decreased inventory latency by 90%+. Salim has a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Colorado Boulder and a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Minnesota-Duluth. He has expertise in modern systems languages, platforms, and cloud tech stacks, including AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, Azure, Ruby, and Hadoop. His technical skills include Software Engineering, DevOps, CI/CD, and Search.