Jeffrey Kay

Summary

Jeffrey Kay has wandered around the software industry for the over 35 years, building a wide range of software. His background includes developer productivity, cloud services, security and other hard engineering problems. He is currently an angel investor and a musician, recording and performing primarily as a percussionist. Jeff was a Software Engineer at Truveta, aggregating medical data into a platform for life science researchers. After years of platform building, Truveta presented a great opportunity to build something to improve health care and work more directly with consumers and partners. Prior, he was a Software Engineer at Meta, joining during the pandemic in 2021, focusing on developer productivity on the Developer Infrastructure team. Jeff was previously a Partner Software Engineer at Microsoft, joining the company in 2005. He last worked as an Architect on the Engineering Systems team in the Windows and Devices Group and was responsible for migrating Windows source control to git. While at Microsoft, Jeff was also a member of the Windows Mobile team, serving as the architect for the Browser and Search team. After delivering the best web experience for WP7 and 7.5, Jeff moved to mobile labs to work on an incubation effort. When that wrapped up, he moved to the Windows Phone Silicon Platform team to work on yet another tented project.   Jeff’s start at Microsoft was as an Architect on the Exchange Team, responsible for both the Exchange product and Exchange Labs, including directory and datacenter architecture, authentication strategy, security, and integration with go-to-market partners. Jeff’s major accomplishment on this team was developing and scaling Exchange Online, now part of Microsoft 365.   In 1998, Jeff co-founded and served as CTO of his first start-up company, which crashed and burned in 2001. Not having learned his lesson, he made a second attempt in 2002 with another startup before joining Microsoft. In both of those startups, Jeff developed peer to peer collaboration and communications software, which was all the rage at the time. Prior to 1998, he did time with a couple of "Beltway Bandits" in the Washington DC area and spent 4 years at IBM developing DRM and search software. Of those years, Jeff is most fond of the time spent working with wholesale distribution systems, which gave him a new perspective on how businesses deploy and use software.