Ian Birch

Microsoft Frontier Company, Industry Solutions Engineering

• Designed and built the FDE AI solution accelerator — a reusable, pattern‑based, spec-informed agentic AI accelerator that compresses MVP delivery time and codifies custom business guidelines, responsible AI patterns, incorporating multi‑agent orchestration, human‑in‑loop review gates, and evaluation harnesses into an extensible solution now used across engineering teams.
• Embed with Fortune 500 and industry leading customers across financial services, insurance, consumer goods, transportation, and SaaS to deliver transformative enterprise solutions with quantifiable business outcomes - each leveraging Microsoft's most advanced AI products and services.
• Utilized design thinking to build and found impactful products — facilitating empathy mapping, divergent/convergent ideation, and user‑centered design workshops that ground technical solutions in real end‑user needs.
• Built innovative solutions such as an AI-powered customer adoption platform, an assistant for real-time financial account and transaction analysis, a multi‑agent underwriting submission and risk assessment pipeline, and other solutions using combinations of generative AI, agentic AI, digital twin, and machine learning technologies to help with manufacturing, data pipelines, product recommendations, and operational optimization.
• Pioneered hypervelocity, AI-infused FDE tradecraft — compressing envisioning and MVP cycles to ≤12 weeks and building custom AI tooling to accelerate planning and execution. Set an example for peers on what a multi-disciplinary FDE role can be in an AI‑first organization.
• Represent Microsoft on stage with customers at industry events as a strategic product partner to their leadership.

Facebook / Messenger

• Launched the Community Chats product on Messenger and Facebook globally, coordinating efforts across Engineering, Product, Design, and Data Science for the technical roadmap and product strategy.
• Launched MVP for social and broadcast channels messaging products on Messenger and Facebook and drove engineering quality initiatives to improve infrastructure and product performance, reliability, and efficiency.
• Established 0→1 programs and led multiple cross-functional teams to grow Community Messaging products, identifying product needs in technically complex areas, scoping requirements, leading rapid exerimentation and prototyping, and owning implementation.
• Drove partnerships across Messenger, Facebook, Instagram, Wellbeing, and Integrity to deliver cohesive, safe, high-quality user experiences.
• Managed interdependent product roadmaps as a collective program and aligned product requirements and dependencies across partner teams. Worked with engineering leaders to simplify complex, technical problems into easily executable and measurable outcomes.
• Managed communication between partner teams, stakeholders, and engineering management and developed strategies for efficiently driving milestone execution and delivery to achieve aggressive growth goals.

• Productized and patented a web-augmentation platform that utilizes virtualized web sessions to modify, extend, or embed new features into any to any web application — SaaS, cloud-hosted, self-hosted, or homegrown.
• Built robust APIs and admin tooling that give enterprises security, control, and a consistent user experience across their entire web-app portfolio.

• Built custom middleware and real-time messaging infrastructure to integrate with different contact-center platforms, including partner integrations and demo tools for NICE, Genesys, Zendesk, Salesforce, and Amazon Connect.
• Built trust and maintained strong customer relationships acting as a technical resource, providing quidance and advisory, engineering solutions, and producing technical architecture, designs, and strategies for complex projects.
• Operate autonomously across multiple teams, demonstrating thought leadership, owning solution design delivery as lead architect and senior customer-facing technical resource.

• Led development of AI framework used to automate workforce management tasks and automated schedule tagging based on real-time adherence.
• Designed and developed cloud-native adapter software for workforce management applications on AWS - retrieving real-time agent status and producing real-time data streams downstream integration.
• Built internal tooling to monitor agent productivity and provide real-time and historical reporting which reduced costs by 60% and eliminated the need for third-party software licenses.
• Designed an enterprise solution to provide dynamically translated web applications, allowing for automatic scraping and custom management over the translated strings in addition to machine translation.
• Built architecture blueprints and service-delivery roadmaps for enterprise applications, advised leadership on updates to existing systems, and proposed forward-thinking solutions to plan for future state.