Vidhart Bhatia

Backend and distributed systems engineer

Seattle, WAvidhartbhatia@outlook.comvidhartbhatia.comgithub.com/vidhartbhatialinkedin.com/in/vidhart

Summary

Backend engineer, six years at Microsoft. C#/.NET product services shipped to GA, the Kubernetes platform behind 116 Xbox services at up to ~1M requests/second in aggregate, and published developer tooling. Migrations, reliability and cost throughout.

Projects and open source

copilot-brag-sheet

  • Local-first Copilot CLI extension plus a typed stdio MCP server that turns session and tool events into structured, durable work records. Atomic persistence, PID locks, orphan recovery.
  • Published on npm across six releases; 184 tests over nine OS and Node combinations.
  • Companion skill accepted into the curated Awesome Copilot collection.

Vids in One Frame

  • Editorial photography journal with a retrieval system over 1,544 images: Azure Vision, SigLIP, DINOv2 and Gemini embeddings fused with Reciprocal Rank Fusion for natural-language search.
  • Astro and TypeScript on Vercel and Cloudflare R2, Git-backed publishing, 329 test declarations. I owned product, photography and curation; AI assisted the implementation.

Upstream:fluxcd/flagger #1241

Experience

Microsoft2020 — present

Microsoft Defender

Security services, and moving them onto Kubernetes.

Xbox platform

  • Owned core infrastructure for Xbox's shared microservices platform — 116 services on ~45 production AKS clusters (~22K pods), up to ~1M requests/second globally, with no platform-attributable availability incidents across major game launches. Primary owner of the cluster fleet behind 17+ live services.
  • Shipped defense-in-depth ingress on Azure (DDoS Protection L3/L4; App Gateway WAF + Bot Manager + custom L7 rate limits; NGINX mTLS/routing); WAF rate-limit rules contained a known L7 DDoS attack and preserved backend stability.
  • Hardened the platform for title launches: validated 50,000 RPS per cluster and 3× traffic bursts, onboarded the highest-traffic service to 10× its prior request volume, and resolved a launch-day Sev-1 with custom App Gateway rate limiting.
  • Led design and early implementation of the Gateway API and Istio migration: authored the spec and ran the cross-team design review. The review showed edge mTLS terminates upstream, so chose that over sidecar passthrough and set rollout, rollback and scaling decisions, plus a draft PR.
  • Made KEDA the platform's default autoscaler through a shared Helm chart and CI/CD pipelines, preserving standard resource scaling while enabling queue-depth and request-rate scaling for custom-metric workloads.
  • Owned the observability stack — Grafana migrations, access and upgrades, Managed Prometheus, and the FluentBit log pipeline — and architected its migration into a hardened internal tenant.
  • Led the "Protect the Admin" security overhaul: replaced standing Azure access with just-in-time PIM elevation and RBAC across 15+ subscriptions for 50+ engineers, adopted by five sister teams. Migrated 30+ secrets and service connections to managed and federated identity with no downtime, eliminating certificate-based auth.
  • As on-call incident owner, cut recurring alert noise and made the remaining alerts actionable; in one cycle eliminated ~30 of 94 recurring alerts by fixing their triggers.
  • Ran the platform's cost and capacity analyses, identifying WAF rightsizing and Kubernetes decommissioning opportunities.
  • Prototyped a read-only, human-gated on-call DRI copilot that triages incidents against runbooks and returns confidence-scored verdicts backed by an evidence trail. A live incident surfaced multi-region clustering and query gaps that shaped the next iteration.

Xbox Cloud Gaming

  • Built C#/.NET session-management and provisioning microservices for console streaming and shipped Remote Play to GA. Integration tests, reconnect handling and telemetry cut reconnect failures ~15% and held provisioning success above 90%.
  • Built an internal logging developer platform for the service fleet: a C# ILogger framework with PII redaction and enforced data contracts, adopted across all services. Re-architected the pipeline from fluentd to FluentBit over ~878 pods, reclaiming ~219.5 CPU cores.
  • Co-owned readiness for the multi-region core migration across Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific, covering logging, data-pipeline and integration-test readiness, and took on more of it as teammates rotated off the project.
  • Mentored Explore-program interns and ran the team's engineering AMA series: 6 sessions, 361+ attendees, rated 4.6/5.

Microsoft — OutlookSummer 2019Calendar features in React and Redux for the Windows Calendar refresh.

BungieSummer 2018Designer tooling for item categorisation in a large C++/C# codebase.

Skills

Working: C#/.NET · TypeScript · Python

Also worked in: Go (upstream PR to Flagger) · Kusto (KQL)

Distributed systems: Kubernetes (AKS) · Terraform · Helm · KEDA · NGINX · Azure Application Gateway / WAF · Istio and Gateway API (design)

Reliability and observability: Grafana · Prometheus · Azure Monitor · FluentBit · incident response and on-call ownership · alerting design · capacity planning

Security and identity: PIM · RBAC · managed and federated identity · Key Vault · DDoS and WAF

AI tooling: MCP server design · LLM tool-calling workflows · embeddings and semantic retrieval

Education

Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science — B.S. in Computer Science; minors in Game Design and Systems Engineering.

vidhartbhatia.com/resume · updated 2026-08-12 ·PDF