Jacob Alber
Principal Software Development Engineer at Microsoft
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJacob Alber is a Principal Software Development Engineer with 11+ years building production-grade ML systems, distributed data pipelines, and cross-platform applications at Microsoft and as a founder. He specializes in reinforcement learning, performant C++/.NET engineering, and integrating agentic AI—contributing Windows build and CI improvements to Vowpal Wabbit and async/runtime enhancements to Microsoft Autogen. Jacob led the engineering and launch of Azure’s first public online reinforcement learning service (Personalizer), owning research-to-production lifecycles while championing security, privacy, and compliance. Comfortable from low-level DirectX/WIC graphics to high-level cloud services and UX, he blends deep systems optimization with practical automation and tooling. Based in New York, he brings startup founder instincts to large-scale platform problems and often focuses on making complex build/runtime workflows simpler and more reproducible.
11 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science Mathematics, BS Computer Science Mathematics at Brandeis University
Russian, French, English
Stackoverflow
39reputation
2kreached
4answers
0questions
Github Skills (35)
c-language10
python10
msbuild10
windows10
autogen10
build-system10
cmake10
cicd10
asyncio10
automation10
agent10
cplus10
ai10
dotnet-core10
automations10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
VowpalWabbit/vowpal_wabbit
Sep 2018 - Oct 2022
Vowpal Wabbit is a machine learning system which pushes the frontier of machine learning with techniques such as online, hashing, allreduce, reductions, learning2search, active, and interactive learning.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Automation EngineerContributions:64 reviews, 60 commits, 98 PRs in 4 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Jacob primarily focused on improving the build process and codebase for the Vowpal Wabbit project, specifically on Windows. They removed legacy projects, simplified build configurations, and unified output paths. Furthermore, they added support for building with CMake and implemented improvements in the CI/CD pipeline to enhance automation for Windows builds. The user demonstrated experience with build systems, and cross-platform code, along with the .NET Core framework in the project.
hashingtechniquescpppythonactive-learning
microsoft/autogen
Mar 2024 - Mar 2025
A programming framework for agentic AI 🤖 PyPi: autogen-agentchat Discord: https://aka.ms/autogen-discord Office Hour: https://aka.ms/autogen-officehour
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:43 reviews, 46 PRs, 97 pushes in 1 year
Contributions summary:Jacob contributed to enhancing the `autogen` framework by addressing issues related to Docker code execution and asynchronous operations. They also made changes to the async input strategy within the agentchat modules and related CLI tools. Furthermore, the user implemented Python-equivalent interfaces within the .NET agent framework and implemented queuing and step mode functionality for the InProcessRuntime, improving the framework's overall architecture and functionality.
agenticagentic-agiagentsaiautogen
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