About Mike L. Swafford
Vice President of Software Engineering at Microsoft.
Mike Swafford is a veteran engineering leader focused on building systems that simplify complexity and accelerate innovation. With nearly three decades at Microsoft, he’s led large-scale efforts to unify engineering workflows, optimize cloud environments, and modernize legacy systems. His work has saved the company hundreds of millions through efficiency and scalability innovations.
Driving Engineering Systems at Global Scale
Mike Swafford has built his career around simplifying complexity. At Microsoft, he spearheaded the transformation of tens of thousands of build and release pipelines, enabling teams to deliver faster, safer, and more consistently. His strategic leadership in unifying systems across the Experience + Devices Division has set a new standard for engineering excellence at scale.
Enhancing Developer Experience
Mike Swafford is deeply passionate about improving developer productivity. By pioneering cloud-based development environments and AI-driven workflow optimization, he’s empowered engineers to focus on creativity rather than complexity. His leadership has helped thousands of developers build better software more efficiently.
From Engineer to Visionary Leader
Beginning as a software engineer, Mike Swafford’s journey at Microsoft spans nearly three decades of innovation. From shipping early versions of Windows and Exchange to leading global teams in cloud transformation, his story reflects a relentless pursuit of excellence and a belief that technology should make life easier—for developers and customers alike.
Stories That Shaped Mike’s Career
Working at UIUC
I started working at UIUC as a programmer as an undergraduate. When I transitioned to graduate school, I paid for my tuition by being a TA. I loved the course material (Intro to Computer Engineering) and enjoyed the students, but I hated grading homework. I decided to do something about it.
It was 1994, and the World Wide Web was just starting. I wondered if I could get students to do their homework online (that way I wouldn’t have to grade it). Within a month or so, I had the MVP of “Mallard” up and running for my class. I created “controls” for various problem types: truth-tables, Karnaugh maps, binary/hexadecimal numbers, and simple logic diagrams. I randomized sets of questions to make it harder to copy homework, and let students keep track if their results. Most importantly, I didn’t have to grade homework anymore.
The professor loved it. So much so, that she became my thesis advisor, and got a grant to let me work full time on it. I was able to publish, present at a conference, and expand to cover other courses. It even turned it my first full-time job after I graduated. I was the “Visiting Computer Assisted Education Specialist” for a year!
Mallard was early web and pretty rough. It didn’t scale well, was written in perl, and probably had security bugs that would make a modern developer blush. However, I learned an amazing amount, and it lasted at a UIUC for at least a decade after I left.
I’m convinced that this project: the self-started nature of it, and the (modest) success is what got me past the round 1 interview at Microsoft.
Shipping Exchange 2000 at Microsoft
In my first few months at Microsoft, we shipped Exchange 5.5 and went hard to work on Exchange 2000, a profoundly ambitious release. With Exchange 2000, we switched from our own integrated directory to a massive bet on the Windows 2000 Active Directory, we changed permissions models, switched from X400 to SMTP as the main way to move email around, created an ambitious extensibility model, and created the now-infamous M-drive.
Anyone who was there will tell you that Exchange 2000 was a hard release. Over a year of “ship mode” with late evenings, and even later pager duty. It was trial-by-fire, but a learned a lot. It was hard not to, I was surrounded by smart, hard-working people, and I just soaked it in. I learned about async IO, completion ports, multi-threaded code, heap corruptions, debugger extensions, and what it meant to work in a massive code base.
But I also learned about shipping software and about shipping large software projects. More importantly, I learned about working with others and working cross-team. I learned about how you manage milestones and get ready for Beta and RTM. I also honed my instincts as a software engineer, being able to guess the root cause of an issue, or predict what kind of changes were risky.
Exchange 2000 was one of the hardest products to ship, but it was also incredible rewarding, and essential to Microsoft’s success.
Shipping Exchange 2003 at Microsoft
Not long after shipping Exchange 2000, I had the opportunity to become a manager (“dev lead” as we called it back then). I managed the team I had formerly worked on, and owned the SMTP, NNTP, POP, and IMAP protocol stacks. I shipped code in both Windows and Exchange, and even helped a new acquisition, Hotmail, move onto the Windows platform.
However, it took long enough to ship Exchange 2000 that management seemed to have lost some amount of faith with Exchange as a generic “web storage” platform. So, Microsoft pivoted to SQL, moved everyone who knew anything about storage from Exchange to the SQL team, and decided that the next version of Exchange would be on top of SQL.
There was one problem with this plan: Exchange 2000 started to sell well… really well. Exchange 2000 needed NT 4.0 and Active Directory, which was great for sales, and pushed an enterprise towards being a “Microsoft Shop”. Exchange had become “sticky”! Leadership realized that this and decided we needed to ship another version of Exchange on the existing architecture.
I got tapped to create and lead the new Exchange storage team and figure out how ship enough new features to entice customers to upgrade. It was a fun but challenging. In a very short time, we had to support our existing customers, learn a new codebase, and still find time to innovate. We did a bunch of amazing things during that timeframe, but the things that stick with me the most adding support for clustering, zero-downtime backup, and an massive improvement in reliability (I ended up with 3 patents related detecting memory corruption bugs early).