Harley Adams

Summary

Cloud architect for global gaming services on Xbox and PlayFab — a network of over a billion players. I set the technical direction for modernizing Xbox Live's live-service platform onto a cloud-native AKS stack, and I've personally designed, built, and operated the Achievements, Leaderboards, Stats, and Time Played systems that sustain 200,000 requests per second across the Xbox Network.

Experience

Microsoft2016 – Present

Architect, Xbox Developer Organization2025 – Present

• Lead the architecture for modernizing legacy Xbox Live services onto a cloud-native AKS stack, setting the technical direction for the wider organization.
• Designing the next generation of Achievements — enriching the semantic meaning of an Achievement with AI-driven enhancements.

Tech Lead & Senior Software Engineer, Xbox / PlayFab2020 – 2025

• Tech lead for gaming cloud services across the Xbox Network ecosystem and Microsoft's PlayFab offering.
• Key engineer driving the design, delivery, and operation of the Achievements, Leaderboards, Stats, and Time Played services — owning architecture decisions and leading the implementation efforts end to end.
• Re-architected the Achievements backend to eliminate critical player data loss, applying at-least-once delivery guarantees so achievement unlocks survive failures and are never silently dropped.

Software Engineer II, Microsoft Sway2016 – 2020

• Designed and shipped the full-stack Sway Author Analytics platform end to end — client-side tracking, ingestion endpoints, Azure Stream Analytics processing, and SQL storage — giving authors visibility into how their content is consumed.
• Drove accessibility across Sway and hardened the service by triaging and fixing publicly reported security bug bounties.

Junior Software Engineer, Fiserv2015 – 2016

Auckland, New Zealand

• Wrote backend services in C# / .NET for mobile banking applications, along with the deployment pipelines for those services.

Game Developer, Ninja Kiwi2013

• Junior developer contributing to the Bloons Monkey City and SAS: Zombie Assault 4 games. Auckland, New Zealand.

Projects

TotallyNotWordle — Battle Royale Edition

• A Wordle-inspired puzzle game with a multiplayer battle-royale mode: players join a lobby and race to guess the word first. Backed by "live service" features — stat tracking, leaderboards, and multiplayer — powered by PlayFab. Built with React, TypeScript, and Material UI. Play it.

Run Box Run

• An Android game published to the Google Play Store, written during university with no frameworks beyond built-in Java and Android APIs.

Skills

• Programming: C# / .NET 8 · Python · JavaScript / TypeScript · PowerShell · Bash
• Architecture & Leadership: Distributed systems design · live-service reliability · technical direction · mentorship
• Cloud & Infra: Azure Kubernetes Service · Docker · Bicep · Terraform · Cosmos DB · Event Hubs · Redis · Grafana · Prometheus · Locust · Azure Load Testing
• AI: Leading AI adoption for engineers across the Xbox Developer organization — driving practices that lift team velocity while holding the line on service reliability across multiple teams.

Education

BSc, Computer Science · University of Auckland2012 – 2014