Jeff Derstadt
Partner Engineering Manager Of MSR Americas, Microsoft Research
Sammamish, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJeff Derstadt is a seasoned engineering leader with nine years in senior roles at Microsoft and a long history of driving cloud, AI, and bot platform engineering to production scale. As Partner Engineering Manager for MSR Americas he now connects cutting-edge ML research to product teams across multiple labs, having previously led Copilot Studio platform and Azure Bot Service to high-reliability, large-scale deployments. He blends hands-on systems and security work—contributing to core Bot Framework SDKs and the Bot Framework Emulator around OAuth and authentication—with strategic delivery of services that handle billions of messages and tens of millions of logins. Jeff has repeatedly moved projects from preview to GA by defining architecture, operational KPIs, and customer empathy programs that improve adoption. He holds an M.Eng. in Computer Science from Cornell and is known for combining rigorous technical depth with operator-first culture and rapid experimentation. A not-obvious strength: he pairs a developer-first mindset (framework and SDK contributions) with enterprise productization and cross-team influence to accelerate technology transfer.
9 years of coding experience
High School Diploma, High School Diploma at The Prairie SchoolMasters of Engineering Computer Science, Masters of Engineering Computer Science at Cornell University
Stackoverflow
21reputation
388reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (26)
authorizations10
javascript10
apidoc10
net10
bots10
authentication10
user-authentication10
typescript10
dotnet10
asp-net10
api10
sdk10
authorization10
typescript-types10
dotnet-core10
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
microsoft/botbuilder-dotnet
Oct 2017 - Feb 2022
Welcome to the Bot Framework SDK for .NET repository, which is the home for the libraries and packages that enable developers to build sophisticated bot applications using .NET.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:65 commits, 21 PRs, 54 pushes in 4 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Jeff's contributions primarily focused on enhancing the authentication and authorization mechanisms within the .NET Bot Framework SDK. They implemented support for newer versions of authentication protocols (v3.2) and removed support for older versions (v3.0). A significant portion of their work involved developing and integrating Enterprise Channel authentication to validate requests from configured channels. This included the implementation of token validation parameters and identity extraction mechanisms.
dotnetsdk-frameworkdotnet-core2botsdk
microsoft/BotFramework-Emulator
Apr 2017 - Nov 2018
A desktop application that allows users to locally test and debug chat bots built with the Bot Framework SDK.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:38 commits, 29 PRs, 27 pushes in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Jeff primarily worked on adding and integrating features within the Bot Framework Emulator. Their contributions involved implementing a botemulator URL protocol handler, which allows the application to be invoked with specific parameters. They also added support for OAuth cards and integrated functionality for Azure for US Government environments. Additionally, the user made changes to improve the emulator's user interface.
botbot-framework-emulatorbot-frameworkreactsdk-framework
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