They’ve helped shape the digital age — inventing such transformational technology as RSS feeds, Google Docs and Lens, Kubernetes, Python and more. Now, these pioneering technologists are among many who have chosen Microsoft as the place to solve hard problems and build what’s next.

Some are returning to Microsoft after years away, while others are joining for the first time, drawn by the company’s scale, its evolving culture — including a growing embrace of open-source software, which is built and shared publicly — and its willingness to invest in long-term bets.

Meet six of the trailblazers behind some of the world’s most well-known technologies who have brought their vision and expertise to help lead new advances in AI at Microsoft.

R.V. Guha created RSS feeds, short for Really Simple Syndication, in 1999. His work changed how people get information online and sped the evolution of blogs and podcasts by allowing users to subscribe to updates from websites automatically, rather than manually checking each one for new content.

Guha joined Microsoft this year to launch NLWeb, an open project that adds conversational experiences to websites so users can “chat” with sites directly to get answers to their questions, without needing to click through menus or search boxes. His ambitions for NLWeb aligned with Microsoft’s vision to make AI more accessible, he says, as well as with the company’s scale and resources to make a meaningful impact.

“It’s probably the thing I’ve been most excited about building in all my life, and that’s not an exaggeration,” Guha says. “If you look at any application or website, the way you interact with it is by clicking on things that the designer thought would be most interesting to you. Imagine being freed of the constraints of what the designer thought and being able to just converse with any application anywhere.”

When Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he saw open source as a way to build better software through collaboration. That view built trust with developers and positioned the company to lead in building tools and services designed for the cloud.

It’s a mindset that attracted Brendan Burns, co-creator of Kubernetes — one of the world’s most widely used open-source technologies. Named after the Greek word for “helmsman,” Kubernetes acts like air-traffic control for software, ensuring programs run smoothly and reliably as they move across different computers and datacenters.

Burns grew up near Microsoft headquarters in the Seattle area and jumped at the chance in 2016 to join a company he described as “the icon of technology” during his childhood. What sealed the decision, he says, was Microsoft’s unmatched legacy of empowering developers.

Today Burns is continuing his focus on the foundational infrastructure that makes modern computing possible — building the tools that help others build things for people to use — as a corporate vice president on the Azure team. Part of his efforts involve developing internal AI tools “to reduce toil” — the repetitive, draining tasks engineers face.

“Everybody signs up to write software, because that’s what we’re excited about,” Burns says. “But at least 50% of the time is spent taking care of the software, fixing security problems, rolling out code, all sorts of operational issues.

“Nobody wants to get woken up in the middle of the night to try and fix a problem,” he says, “so we’re seeing how we can apply technology to effectively remove or reduce the things people don’t really like about the job and enable them to focus on the things that they do.”

After 25 years of “working nonstop” in tech, including leading the development of Google Lens and Google Now, Aparna Chennapragada was midway through a sabbatical — traveling with family, tackling projects at home and prototyping ideas for fun — when a friend arranged a call with Nadella.

The CEO “told me we should aim to be learn-it-alls, not know-it-alls,” she recalls. It was 2023, and generative AI had just begun reshaping the industry at breakneck speed, so “that really stuck with me. There’s never been a moment in tech when that mindset mattered more, because with AI, the ground keeps shifting every few months. Yesterday’s magic is today’s commodity.”

Taking deep technical insights and building intuitive products that help millions of people has been the “steel thread” through Chennapragada’s career, she says, so that conversation inspired her to set aside her remodeling projects and join Microsoft.

Initial projects included helping to create an AI-first visual editor and the Frontier program to help businesses adopt AI, as well as kickstarting the Microsoft 365 Copilot app as a hub of productivity. She’s now chief product officer of experiences and devices, helping reimagine productivity in the age of AI — in part by leading efforts to build intelligent agents, or AI assistants that can reason, plan and take action, with permission.

“AI has the power to amplify human potential, not just automate it away,” Chennapragada says. “I wanted to be at the center of shaping that.”

Building powerful AI tools is only part of the equation; making them responsibly so they work as intended is the next frontier, and one that Sarah Bird is tackling.

Bird, who helped create ONNX — a kind of common language for AI programs so different tools can “speak” to each other — is now chief product officer of responsible AI at Microsoft. One of her team’s missions is to ensure that AI agents are not just trusted, but worthy of that trust.

“You need to give agents access to a lot of important things and the ability to take action, but you want them to stay focused and stay on task with what you told them to do and not allow them to do anything else,” Bird says. “Designing systems to enable us to do that is really, really fun and challenging.”

Bird’s work is shaped by a long-term view of innovation. She returned to Microsoft in 2019 after a stint at Facebook, now Meta — drawn back, she says, by Microsoft’s early and sustained investment in responsible AI, even when it was still considered an academic concern and customers weren’t paying much attention.

“Once the whole world woke up to why this was so important, we had been working on it the whole time, so we were really well positioned to start moving quickly when our customers needed us,” she says. “Microsoft’s leadership just absolutely gets that we really need to invest in all of the other dimensions of AI — security and safety and privacy.

“If we don’t get it right now,” Bird says, “we don’t get the huge, amazing, long-term future.”

She also credits the collaborative “One Microsoft” culture with making it possible to bring together deep layers of experts in fields as different as privacy, threat intelligence, identity, fairness and even biological systems to help solve problems that no single discipline could tackle alone.

Sam Schillace, one of the creators of what became Google Docs following Google’s acquisition of his startup Writely, joined Microsoft in 2021 because he saw it becoming an “open-minded, more energetic, startup-y place.” He’s now leading a prototyping team within the office of the chief technology officer exploring how AI can collaborate with humans in more open-ended ways — building tools that blend traditional code with AI reasoning, memory and context awareness.

“I don’t build models; I consume them,” Schillace says. The foundation models that power AI, which are large systems trained on huge amounts of data, “have been a little like going to a restaurant where they put an amazing piece of meat on your plate, but it’s not cooked. And I would like it to be cooked and have vegetables and silverware and an actual meal” — in other words, genuinely useful, not just impressive.

“It’s cool if it does neat tricks,” he says, “but it doesn’t matter if the human is still spending just as much time getting the work done.”

Schillace sees AI as a fundamental shift in computing, akin to the move from desktop to cloud.

“This is the first time we’ve had the ability to make excess cognitive power outside of our brains,” he says. “You can turn electricity into thinking, the way you can turn electricity into force and motion. You can pay for time now, having many agents think and do work for you in parallel. We don’t just work with syntax and code now; we can work with meaning and intention.”

Guido van Rossum, the inventor of Python — a programming language used by millions of developers to tell computers what to do — joined Microsoft in 2020 after the double whammy of retirement and the pandemic left him restless.

There, van Rossum led a team making Python faster by removing the “clutter” from the language and started “dabbling in little AI projects on the side.”

Then in a twist even he didn’t expect, AI helped him make a late-career shift: After decades of shaping how code is written, he used an AI chat program to teach himself TypeScript — a newer programming language invented at Microsoft — and now uses it to build systems that help AI agents remember what users have said, even across long conversations.

It’s a project van Rossum says will help alleviate his own frustration when using AI programs — at work and at home.

Part of what he values now is the chance to be part of a team of smart, experienced colleagues, something he says he’d miss if he were working solo.

“If I wasn’t employed, I’d still be coding and taking on hobby projects,” he says. “But I’d be much more isolated and wouldn’t have the benefit of talking to a rich set of coworkers with all kinds of experience so I can learn very quickly.”

Illustrations created by Makeshift. R.V. Guha photo by Jim Gensheimer. All other photos provided by subjects. Story published on Oct. 9, 2025.