Azure Storage Control Plane leader · Distributed systems · AI-native engineering

Leading cloud platforms at massive scale. Reimagining how engineering teams build, operate, and innovate with AI.

I’m Nilay Shah, an Azure Storage engineering leader at Microsoft. I lead the control plane behind foundational Azure storage services and help teams improve developer experience, agent experience, and engineering efficiency through AI-native systems.

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Foundational Azure platform services
Developer and agent experience
AI-native engineering transformation

Nilay Shah speaking at a Microsoft engineering event — Engineering leadership in practice **Distributed systems · Platform engineering · AI-native transformation**

NEWSLETTER

The AI-Native Engineer

Practical lessons on building, operating, and leading with AI—from agentic systems and software engineering to reliability at scale.

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FEATURED FIELD NOTE

From incident context to confident action

Azure SRE Agent

Operate Smarter with Azure SRE Agent: Transforming the On-Call DRI Experience

How an Azure Storage team started with one incident pattern, built trust through a measurable feedback loop, and changed the way on-call engineers investigate livesite issues.

Case study AI-assisted operations Human-in-the-loop

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WHAT I EXPLORE

Building platforms and transforming engineering

Cloud platforms at scale

Control planes and distributed systems that power foundational Azure services across storage accounts, disks, and Elastic SAN.

AI-native engineering

Agentic systems, multi-agent patterns, evaluation loops, and the journey from proof of concept to production.

Developer and agent experience

Reducing engineering friction through better platforms, workflows, automation, and AI teammates grounded in real work.

Engineering transformation

Leading distributed teams, improving engineering efficiency, and helping people adopt new ways of building and operating.

ABOUT

Scale the platform. Improve the system of engineering.

I lead Azure Storage Control Plane engineering and work at the intersection of distributed cloud platforms, AI-native systems, developer experience, and people. My goal is to share useful patterns and honest lessons—not just polished outcomes.

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