KurtSeippel
Building and leading the teams behind products used by millions.
Engineering leader with 15+ years at Microsoft founding and scaling high-performing teams, setting technical vision, and driving AI-powered capabilities into flagship products like Excel and Intune.
I lead with empathy, clarity, and a healthy paranoia.
I've spent my career building engineering teams that ship flagship software to millions of people. The products change — Windows, Company Portal, Intune, now Excel — but the work is the same: set a clear direction, hire and grow great engineers, and protect the conditions that let them do their best work.
I lead with empathy for my team, partner teams, and customers; a bias toward continuous improvement; and trust built through active listening. I try to shelter my team from churn so they can focus, keep a healthy paranoia about what could go wrong, and remember that clarity is kindness.
How I show up
- A Empathy for team, partners, and customers
- B Continuous improvement over comfort
- C Trust built through active listening
- D Shelter the team so they can focus
- E A healthy paranoia about what could break
Principles I lead by
Clarity is kindnessVague feedback is the unkind kind.
Delegate to the point of failureThat edge is where people grow.
Delayed conflict accrues debtAddress it while the interest is low.
People don't fear change, they fear lossName the loss, lead the change.
Laziness is a symptom of someone who is lostFind the missing clarity, not the blame.
Know which doors are reversibleTwo-way doors deserve speed; one-way doors deserve care.
Father of four boys. Avid reader and gamer. Compete on a paintball team — where the two-way-door instinct gets a real-world workout.
Fifteen years at Microsoft, founding and scaling teams that ship.
From SDET on Windows to Principal Manager on Excel — building Android apps, Azure services, and the AI features behind them.
Microsoft
Principal Software Engineering Manager — Microsoft Excel
Lead a team of 9 engineers owning data modeling in Excel, one of the world's most widely used applications, partnering across product, design, and partner organizations to set direction and deliver features.
- Driving the integration of Power Pivot and PivotTables into Excel Agent, Excel's AI assistant with millions of monthly active users, bringing AI-powered data modeling to a rapidly growing base.
- Defined and championed a multi-year vision to modernize Power Pivot, extend it to Excel on the web, and deepen AI integration — aligning strategy with partner teams such as SQL Server and Power BI.
- Improved live-site reliability by strengthening monitoring and launching a cross-team incident-response and postmortem practice that drove lasting fixes across organizations.
- Own performance and career development with zero voluntary attrition to date — coaching engineers to promotion while upholding a high bar.
Principal Software Engineering Manager — Microsoft Intune
Founded and led a team that scaled from 6 to 10 engineers, building and maintaining core functionality for the Intune platform with a focus on the Android ecosystem.
- Led development and monthly release of two Kotlin Android apps: Managed Home Screen (1M+ MAU) and Remote Help (200K+ MAU).
- Designed and built a C# microservice with a TypeScript front-end for firmware-over-the-air (FOTA) updates, unblocking tens of thousands of new device licenses.
- Partnered with OEMs such as Samsung and Zebra to co-design and ship features and resolve issues affecting large device fleets.
- Grew two ICs into engineering managers, and hired 30+ full-time engineers and interns through rigorous interviewing.
Senior Software Engineer — Microsoft Intune
Built and shipped software across Android and Azure, owning the full lifecycle from design through testing, deployment, and support for apps and services impacting millions of devices.
- Built and operated a full-stack C# Azure microservice serving 10M+ MAU.
- Built Company Portal, a Java Android app, growing it to 5M+ MAU.
- Developed TypeScript Azure portal blades enabling IT pros to set up enrollment, configure settings, and monitor Android devices at scale.
Software Development Engineer in Test — Microsoft Windows
Built test automation in C# and C++ for the Windows OS, ensuring software patches shipped free of regressions to millions of client machines.
Sircon Corporation
Software Engineer
Integral member of a six-person team building web-based applications that streamlined processes for insurance companies, agents, and state regulators in an agile environment.
What I bring to a team.
Leadership & Management
- Team building & scaling
- Hiring & interviewing
- Mentorship & career growth
- Technical vision & roadmap
- Performance management
- Incident response
- Cross-functional partnership
- Agile delivery
Languages
- C#
- Kotlin
- Java
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- C++
- SQL
Platforms & Tools
- Microsoft Azure
- Microservices
- REST APIs
- Android
- AI / Copilot integration
- CI/CD
Where it started.
M.S., Computer Science
Georgia Institute of Technology — College of Computing Atlanta, GAB.S., Computer Science
Michigan State University — College of Engineering Minor in Business · East Lansing, MILet's talk about your team.
Open to conversations about engineering leadership roles. The fastest way to reach me is email — or grab the résumé for the full picture.