← Back to home

01 / RESUME

Resume

Skylar (Sulim) Nam · Senior Software Engineer · Greater Seattle, WA

Download PDF ↓

I make complex systems reliable—and easier to evolve. My work spans software architecture, reliability, and modernization, with ownership from the first design to the real-world outcome.

Experience

Jul 2019 — Present
Redmond, WA

Senior Software Engineer

Microsoft · Visual Studio

Own the architecture and evolution of the Visual Studio Installer, a graph-based platform for IDE installs, updates, migrations, and extensions, with end-to-end ownership of distributed workflow orchestration, telemetry, reliability, and performance.

  • Developed Visual Studio Rollback and led delivery of extension support, soft-reboot behavior, installer experience improvements, and install/download optimizations. Reduced hard-reboot rate from 29.7% to 7.71%, supported 1.5K weekly Rollback sessions, and sustained 99%+ extension download success across 1.5M+ sessions annually.
  • Designed and developed the dependency-aware foundation for parallel package installation using Kahn’s topological sort, preserving dependency order while parallelizing independent installs. Benchmarked up to 70% faster package installation and 30% end-to-end improvement, saving customers up to 3M hours annually, with rollout guarded by feature flags, telemetry, and staged validation.
  • Lead Visual Studio Setup reliability through Kusto/KQL, telemetry analysis, crash and failure diagnostics, and AI-assisted automation using Copilot CLI and MCP-backed workflows. Converted multi-hour triage into automated reports and sustain 97%+ install success and 98–99%+ update success.
  • Led the multi-year WiX 3 to WiX 6 modernization across repositories, partner teams, and legacy build systems. Redesigned decade-old MSI infrastructure spanning approximately 1,000 projects, pruned 352 unused projects, converted 286+ projects, and codified migration guidance into a reusable Copilot Agent Skill to reduce future partner-team migration effort.
  • Shipped the Visual Studio 2026 migration experience across release channels, settings, and extensions, including the installer’s first per-user extension discovery capability. Supported 4M+ migration sessions across 232 countries/regions.
  • Scaled team impact through architecture reviews, telemetry guidance, PR reviews, AI-assisted engineering standards, WiX migration training, technical demos, mentoring, inclusive hiring, and women-in-engineering community work reaching approximately 500 employees.
  • Built Setup Hotseat Agent, a multi-persona AI agent with orchestration to streamline high-volume questions and feedback for the Setup team. Served as the first point of contact for users installing Visual Studio, reducing manual triage and response effort.
Jul 2018 — Jul 2019

Software Engineer

Microsoft · Azure Intelligence Platform

Built ETL and schema-mapping automation that reduced partner-team onboarding by 30 minutes to 2 hours per process. Made workflows repeatable through tooling, demos, and documentation.

Jul 2017 — Aug 2017

Quantitative Analyst Intern

Prattle Analytics

Improved NLP-based speaker detection for financial sentiment analytics from 50% to nearly 100% accuracy. Contributed to scoring-model research.

Education

2024 — Present

University of Pennsylvania

Master of Science in Engineering in Artificial Intelligence · In progress

2014 — 2018

Washington University in St. Louis

Double Major in Computer Science and Economics & Strategy

Expertise & tools

Software architecture · System design · Dependency graphs · Distributed workflows · Reliability engineering · Performance optimization · Telemetry & observability · Engineering automation

C#/.NET, Python, SQL, C++, Java, XAML, Scala, Rust, Kusto/KQL, Azure DevOps, Git, CI/CD, WPF, LLM APIs, MCP, React Native, PostgreSQL, Redis, Vercel.

Explore my independent projects →