Derek Smith
Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft
United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDerek Smith is a Senior Software Engineer with 11 years of experience building cloud infrastructure and storage systems, currently contributing to the data plane of Azure Blob Storage at Microsoft. He has driven reliability and multi-tenancy improvements across major cloud providers, including Amazon EFS and Oracle bare-metal compute, and has a track record of designing features that enhance firmware control and automate security vulnerability notification. With a Ph.D. in Mathematics and prior roles in academia and research, he brings rigorous analytical thinking to distributed systems, fault recovery, and high-dimensional time-series problems. He also translates research into practical products—leading a NASA SBIR effort and teaching programming and math—so he blends deep theory with pragmatic, production-first engineering. An understated strength is his history of rapidly restoring control plane state under outage conditions, prioritizing speed with minimal dependencies.
11 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree Mathematics, Bachelor’s Degree Mathematics at Penn State UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Mathematics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Mathematics at UC Santa BarbaraBachelor’s Degree Meteorology, Bachelor’s Degree Meteorology at Naval Postgraduate School
Stackoverflow
363reputation
22kreached
1answer
1question
Github Skills (4)
functional-programming6
matlab6
image-processing6
image6
Github contributions (2)
dls82/moose
Mar 2015 - May 2017
Contributions:40 commits, 39 pushes, 4 branches in 2 years 1 month
dls82/Chip8
Jul 2018 - Jul 2018
Contributions:6 pushes, 1 branch in 3 days
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