Steve Ash

About Steve Ash

Hands on\" technical leader with 20 years of experience solving problems at the intersection of academia and industry, delivering scalable, production software products. Enthusiastic builder keeping hands on keyboard; while also developing technical strategy to orgs of people; people/relationship focused on how to empower the next leaders in the org. PhD Computer Science, issued 10+ patents, published 10+ papers in academic conferences. Deeply technical and passionate about AI and NLP as well as deep technical expertise in architecture, distributed systems, and performance engineering. Some commercial projects that I have lead include:* Amazon Quick: agentic AI platform for business users with unified conversational agents, business intelligence, automation flows, analysis and research agents* Amazon Q Scenarios: novel analysis tool for structured data for business users: use language in an interactive canvas to combine/analyze/explore data. Under the covers it\'s complex planning/reasoning/code agents. Owned this one as the technical leader from whiteboard to delivery.* Generative BI in Amazon QuickSight Q: use language to author charts and calculations. Owned this from whiteboard to production. The first major BI tool to get Gen AI tech into customers hands.* Amazon QuickSight Q: a natural language Q&A system for databases (before ChatGPT). Simply ask questions and get answers as graphs, tables, and KPI numbers in seconds.* ML Transforms for AWS Glue, including FindMatches the generic Record Linkage-at-scale solution that doesn\'t require you to be a Machine Learning practitioner* Identity matching and entity resolution at scale for patient populations in hospitals; deployed in city and state-wide hospital systems and Health Information Exchanges in Texas, Oklahoma, and Ohio.* Check fraud detection in real-time at the Teller line and batch overnight on incoming partner checks using image analysis and behavior/pattern analysis deployed in top-tier banks in USA and Canada* Processing hundreds of millions of check transactions per day exchanged between top 25 banks in the United States as part of the Vector: Image Exchange and SVPCo exchange network projects.Intrinsically curious with extensive experience in distributed systems, AI,(now \"classical\") machine learning, and scaling systems, people, and orgs. Bootstraps small scrappy teams to deliver impossible projects. Loves it all and thrives under pressure and ambiguity.

Experience

1. Principal Engineer

   Microsoft

   Sep 2025 — Present · Redmond, WA, US

Education

• Rhodes College

  Bachelor's degree, Computer Science

• University of Memphis

  Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science

• University of Memphis

  Master of Science (MS), Computer Science

Skills

• Data Mining
• Requirements Analysis
• Object Oriented Design
• Agile Methodologies
• Iis
• Web Services
• Databases
• Architectures
• C++
• Sql Server
• Architecture
• Programming
• Spark
• Probabilistic Models
• Software Development
• Java
• C#
• .net
• Machine Learning
• Software Engineering
• Soa
• Artificial Intelligence
• Microsoft Sql Server
• Scala
• Operating Systems
• Sdlc
• Uml
• Software Project Management
• Visual Studio
• Software Design
• Xml
• Artificial Neural Networks
• Sql
• Service-Oriented Architecture (Soa)
• Subversion
• Distributed Systems