Nick Thompson

I'm a Principal Cloud & Infrastructure Engineer and the final escalation point for all Microsoft technologies across 100+ enterprise tenants. Azure, Microsoft 365, Entra ID, Windows Server — plus the private cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments that connect all of it. I got here by spending 15 years progressing from the service desk to the highest technical tier at the same company.

I like fixing things. Diagnosing a storage bottleneck that's been haunting an application for months. Tracing a brute-force attack across thousands of login attempts and shutting it down in 24 hours. Finding a platform-level design flaw that nobody knew existed and building the case until the vendor commits to fixing it globally.

I like building things. Automated compliance audits across hundreds of tenants. Deployment systems that turn hours of manual work into minutes. Monitoring tools that catch what the vendor's own alerting misses. AI-augmented engineering workflows that multiply what one person can do.

And I like making the people around me better at what they do. I've trained engineers across multiple tiers, built a self-sufficient Azure team from scratch, and I believe the real measure of senior engineering is whether your team can operate without you.

I write about what I see from this seat.