Mark Hillebrand
Principal Software Development Engineer at Microsoft
Dusseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMark Hillebrand is a Principal Software Development Engineer based in Düsseldorf with 11 years of industry experience driving reliability and cross-platform compatibility at Microsoft. He has progressed through multiple engineering roles since 2010, focusing on build systems, CI/CD and maintaining high-quality code in large-scale open-source projects such as the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK) and the Cognitive Services Speech SDK. Mark’s contributions span languages and platforms—from fixing Linux and CPU-only builds to producing multi-language speech samples—showing a pragmatic full-stack mindset that bridges research code and production readiness. Colleagues rely on him for untangling build issues and preserving testability in complex ML tooling, a niche skillset that keeps developer workflows smooth behind the scenes.
11 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Universität des Saarlandes
Github Skills (21)
c-language10
translation10
speech-synthesis10
cmake10
computer-engineering10
dotnet-core10
speech-recognition10
cprogramming-language10
csharp10
javascript9
debugging9
java9
build-system9
javas9
cuda8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
microsoft/CNTK
Oct 2015 - Sep 2017
Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK), an open source deep-learning toolkit
Role in this project:
Software Engineer
Software EngineerContributions:3 releases, 921 commits, 18 PRs in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Mark's commits focused on fixing file headers and addressing build issues in the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK) repository. The contributions included correcting file headers across multiple source files, fixing CPU-only build configurations, and temporarily commenting out or fixing tests related to sparse matrix operations. They also worked on Linux build support and made changes related to the new Image Reader architecture, demonstrating a focus on maintaining code quality and ensuring compatibility across different build configurations.
cntkdeep-learningcognitive-toolkitmachine-learningdeep-neural-networks
Azure-Samples/cognitive-services-speech-sdk
Mar 2018 - Feb 2022
Sample code for the Microsoft Cognitive Services Speech SDK
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:55 reviews, 447 commits, 97 PRs in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Mark's commits primarily focus on the development and maintenance of sample code for the Microsoft Cognitive Services Speech SDK. They demonstrate the ability to work across different technologies and platforms, including C#, Java, JavaScript, and C++. The contributions include the creation of speech-to-text, translation, and speech synthesis samples, showcasing a strong understanding of the SDK's functionalities. The user also contributed to the build and CI/CD aspects of the project by adding build definitions and fixing build issues.
microsoft-cognitive-servicesspeech
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.