Kenan Banks

About Kenan Banks

Full-stack hacker w/ design chops. I learned to code in BASIC when I was 8 and never stopped. After 20+ years of professional experience, I\'m now happiest leading teams and supporting high-performance websites.My personal heroes: Paul Graham / Rob Pike / Bret Victor / Rich Hickey / Doug Engelbart / Edward Tufte / Jakob Neilson / Jef Raskin / Clay Shirky / C.A.R. Hoare / Joel Spolsky / Peter Norvig / Tim Pope / Steven Wittens /@antirezMy favorite CS texts:The Dragon Book / A Pattern Language / Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs / PragProg / The Little Lisper / The Art of Computer Programming / The Linux Programming Interface / The Art of Unix ProgrammingCoding is my primary creative outlet, but when I\'m not building away, I\'m usually tending to my yoga practice, DJing somewhere, or playing the guitar poorly.

Experience

1. Managing Director, Cloud Solution Architecture

   Microsoft

   Nov 2022 — Present · New York, NY, US

   Lead \"CodeWith Northeast\", a team of forward-deployed AI engineers (FDEs) as they developed and deployed bleeding edge AI solutions for Microsoft\'s largest Azure cloud customers. Customer projects included custom model deployments, provisioned throughput, custom indexing and search, large-scale RAG implementations, agentic/multi-agent development and more. As CodeWith lead for Microsoft\'s Northeast region- Personally recruited, hired, and coached a high-performance team of superstar engineers- Owned delivery of complex technical customer projects and managed day-to-day operations across several simultanenously running engagements- Frequent collaboration and consultation with VP- and C-level customer stakeholders, including regular travel for on-site meetings- Developed, documented, and exported best practices for other FDE \"CodeWith\" teams- Coordinated frequently with internal Microsoft stakeholders from product, go-to-market, sales, research, and the office of the CTO to help deliver actionable insight from the field.Impact- Laser focused on maintaining high-veolcity while protecting customer outcomes, Codewith Northeast led all Microsoft operating units worldwide (21 total) for FY24 and FY25 in _both_ number of projects completed and measured customer satisfaction- The team completed 30+ projects in two years, eventually scaling up to a rate of 2 to 3 completed projects per month.

Education

• Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology

  HS Diploma

  1994 — 1998

Skills

• Html
• Jquery
• Prototype
• Google App Engine
• Javascript
• Python
• Css
• Ajax
• Xml
• Xslt
• Json
• Twitter Api
• Facebook Api
• Sql
• Non-Relational Databases
• Databases