Headline

Software Engineer @ Microsoft | Backend & Distributed Systems

About

Software Engineer at Microsoft with 3+ years of experience, building distributed backend systems and AI-powered features for PowerPoint Copilot. Focused on scalable microservices, LLM-powered workflows, and production reliability. Previously built iOS features for Microsoft Teams and Stream. BTech in Information Technology, NSUT. I also write technical deep-dives on systems programming and distributed systems (60+ articles on Medium, 9 editor-curated).

Location

India

AI stack

claude code

github copilot

mcp

railway

githubcopilot

OpenAI Playground

Work experience

Software Engineer at Microsoft, Jul 2023 - Present · 3 yrs 2 mos, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India, - Backend development for PowerPoint Copilot, including the Translation Feature and Narrative Builder. - Cut data-transfer failure rate from 14% to 2% for translation via an Azure Blob Storage reliability framework. - Architected event-driven backend services for Agent Mode which currently serves ~128K daily queries in Production. - Applied strong systems-programming fundamentals (C++) to ship robust, performant features that improved user engagement. - Reduced on-call root-cause analysis time by overhauling production telemetry and observability; automating distributed tracing and real-time dashboards (KQL) to track memory leaks, CPU throttling, and p99 latencies. - Built and enhanced video-experience features for the Microsoft Teams and Stream iOS apps, collaborating with cross-functional teams on integration and reliability.

Software Development Engineer at Visa, May 2022 - Jul 2022 · 3 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, • Enhanced the resilience of the Availability Management Service by implementing Kubernetes etcd for improved database allocation. • Developed efficient and reliable code using Go, significantly contributing to service stability and performance. • Conducted comprehensive API testing with Postman to validate and optimize service interactions.

Education

Bachelor of Technology - BTech, Information Technology, Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology

Higher Secondary, Mathematics and Computer Science, kendriya vidyalaya

Public links

github: https://github.com/Nidhi-Gahlawat

medium: https://medium.com/@nidhigahlawat