Sam: Live Search Profile

Search Architect

Why did you leave your job tending sheep to become an architect?

There was a sheep coup, and I was deposed. That, and I missed having geek stories to tell the family at dinner time.

What do you spend most of your day doing?

There is a lot of variety. I get to work with a lot of different problems, people, and other organizations -- everything from low level coding, to scalable design, capacity planning, mentoring, team-building, and sharing technology with other product groups and MS Research. One of the great joys of my job is that it allows me to balance between depth and scope -- I can really wrap my head around a few deep technical problems, but still look at the big picture.

What are some of the primary challenges building a scalable architecture?

The primary purpose of architecting for scalability is to ensure that the service remains cheap to run as it grows. In very large services such as MSN search, the cost of components, their intrinsic reliability, power consumption, network bandwidth costs, skilled human labor costs, the processes for repairing hardware failures, etc., are all very important factors the design. The biggest challenge -- one that the MSN Search team has met fabulously with its first release -- is building a system that is efficient and reliable when component failures are the norm, rather than the exception.

What type of innovation are you working on?

I am currently most deeply involved in building a massively distributed system for archiving and efficiently querying the huge amount of instrumented data that MSN search collects every day.

How do you balance being a dad with such a technical role?

It has been an interesting adjustment for me. I certainly wake up earlier in the morning. I have to be more formal with my time scheduling than I used to. It is important to me to have well-defined time that work does not encroach on, and so far, that seems to be compatible with Microsoft's values (I'm not sure that was true when I was a Microsoft developer 12 years ago -- but the company has matured, I think). My wife and three-year-old son are very supportive; they often come across the lake to have dinner with me on the East side to help avoid rush-hour commuting.

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