Dean Ward
Principal Engineer (Azure API Management) at Microsoft
Brighton, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDean Ward is a Principal Engineer at Microsoft with two decades of experience designing and delivering high-performance, resilient .NET systems at scale. He has driven major platform initiatives—securing token stores with managed identities and customer-managed keys, migrating large multi-region data layers to Cosmos DB, and achieving six-nines data-plane SLAs—bringing practical cryptography, networking and systems expertise to cloud-native services. Previously he led platform and architecture work at Stack Overflow, modernising deployment, configuration and observability standards and rebuilding core services to support hundreds of thousands of teams and millions of jobs daily. Dean blends deep low-level understanding with pragmatic engineering leadership, often owning end-to-end migrations that required zero-downtime rollouts across 50 regions. Based in Brighton, he’s known for quietly improving operational resilience and developer ergonomics rather than chasing surface-level features.
13 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BSc) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BSc) Computer Science at Loughborough University
Stackoverflow
4,793reputation
366kreached
94answers
8questions
Github Skills (88)
vector-search10
windows10
asp-net-core10
sharding10
asp-net10
spatial10
nosql10
linux10
dotnet10
arangodb10
exchange10
database10
search-engine10
bosun10
cross-platform10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
NFig/NFig.AspNetCore
Jan 2019 - Jul 2020
Integrates NFig with ASP.NET Core via the options pattern
Contributions:14 commits, 4 PRs, 20 pushes in 1 year 6 months
dotnetaspasp-netnet-coreoptions
deanward81/bakedbean.org.uk
Jan 2019 - Jun 2023
Source code for https://bakedbean.org.uk/
Contributions:4 reviews, 33 PRs, 134 pushes in 4 years 5 months
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