William Blum
Principal Research Engineer at Microsoft
Redmond, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWilliam Blum is a Principal Research Engineer with 19 years of experience translating deep technical research into production security services at Microsoft, including founding work on Project Springfield/Microsoft Security Risk Detection and current efforts to embed large deep learning models into M365 Security & Compliance. He combines a strong academic foundation (D.Phil. from Oxford) and formal-methods background with practical engineering skills across systems, DevOps, and functional programming (notably F#) to ship scalable cloud fuzzing and RL-enabled cyber-security platforms. William has hands-on open-source contributions to notable projects like microsoft/CyberBattleSim, improving CI/CD, Docker builds and backend rewards logic, demonstrating a focus on production reliability and reproducible research. He leads teams end-to-end—from architecture and MVP delivery to operating services at scale—and brings a rare mix of programming-language theory, game-theoretic research, and applied security engineering to drive novel defenses.
19 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
D.Phil. Computer Science, D.Phil. Computer Science at University of OxfordMaster Computer science mathematics, Master Computer science mathematics at ENSIIE - École Nationale Supérieure d'Informatique pour l'Industrie et l'Entreprise
English, French
Github Skills (10)
github-ci10
docker10
githubaction-workflow10
python10
dockers10
cicd10
nodejs9
bash8
cybersecurity8
testing7
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
microsoft/CyberBattleSim
Jan 2021 - Jan 2023
An experimentation and research platform to investigate the interaction of automated agents in an abstract simulated network environments.
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer & Backend Developer
DevOps Engineer & Backend DeveloperContributions:14 reviews, 21 commits, 121 PRs in 2 years
Contributions summary:William primarily focused on improving the build and deployment process, as evidenced by the changes to the Docker build process, upgrade to Node.js 16, and CI/CD-related commits. They also addressed a bug, fixed an issue with the python path, and added a github action to mill notebooks. Furthermore, the user contributed to the backend code by implementing features like node capturing reward and removed misleading index in the code.
interactionexperimentationagentssimulationmultiagent-systems
blumu/ResumableMonad
Oct 2015 - Sep 2016
Contributions:23 commits, 2 PRs, 23 pushes in 11 months
resumablemonad
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