About

Thoughtful engineering, grounded in the problem.

I'm Bolton Opondo, a software engineer with over seven years of experience building production software and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Kenyatta University.

Background

My experience spans frontend and full-stack engineering, web and mobile applications, backend integrations, telemetry, system reliability and AI-powered experiences.

I started my career working on product engineering, building and improving software experiences and contributing to the reliability of production systems. At Microsoft, my work evolved from Feed engineering and product delivery into AI quality, evaluation, retrieval and the reliability of intelligent systems.

I'm particularly interested in the intersection of software engineering, system design and AI research engineering. I enjoy understanding complex problems, investigating system behaviour, designing measurable improvements and turning technical insights into working systems.

Outside professional work, I explore independent engineering projects and contribute to Dare To Dream Africa as a volunteer, primarily through website development.

Currently

I'm a Software Engineer II at Microsoft, currently working on Microsoft 365 Copilot Tuning. The Microsoft experience overview covers what I have worked on there, and my full employment history is on LinkedIn.

Engineering philosophy

Six principles I try to work by.

Understand the problem first

Before choosing a solution, find out who is affected, what is actually going wrong and which constraints matter.

Think beyond the implementation

Consider the wider system: how a change behaves in production, what it depends on and who has to maintain it.

Let evidence decide

Use measurement to check whether an improvement is real, and say so plainly when the evidence is not there yet.

Own the outcome

Care about whether the work achieved its purpose, not only whether the assigned task was closed.

Work with others

Seek different perspectives, collaborate across teams and help the people around me succeed.

Keep learning

Question assumptions, stay curious about unfamiliar systems and keep deepening technical understanding.

How I work

I'm curious by default. When something behaves unexpectedly, I would rather understand why than work around it, and I am comfortable picking up systems and codebases I don't know yet. Some of my most interesting work started in an area I first had to learn from scratch.

I pay close attention to detail, especially in code reviews, design documents and testing. I try to catch the edge case, the missing state or the assumption that hasn't been written down before it reaches users, and I test what I ship rather than assuming it works.

When I find a quality issue, I try to follow it through: investigate it, explain it and see it resolved or handed to the right people. Over time I have learned to ask questions and raise blockers early, and to treat an investigation that ends with a clear "this doesn't work, and here's why" as a real result.

I enjoy helping other engineers succeed. That has meant onboarding new teammates, pairing on difficult problems, reviewing code carefully and sharing what I have learned about a system so that others don't have to rediscover it.

A lot of my work involves partner teams, and I value the different perspectives that brings. I look for feedback, take it seriously and fold it into the next iteration. I also write things down: clear documentation and write-ups make complex or invisible technical work easier for others to understand, review and build on.

Areas of interest

Software engineering and system design, evaluation of AI systems, retrieval and grounding, agent memory, and the reliability of products that depend on them. I explore some of these through Memory Lab and the research notes on this site.

Community

Since August 2024 I have volunteered with Dare To Dream Africa, mainly on website development.

Education

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Kenyatta University.