Microsoft engineer drives Azure performance and pushes for more women in hardware

Ketki Haridas, a senior platform system engineer at Microsoft in Mountain View, helps validate Azure’s ARM-based Cobalt server processors and has helped lift Azure networking throughput by 50%. Her career also highlights the lack of women in hardware and performance engineering, a gap she wants more young engineers to help close.

Why it matters: - Ketki Haridas works on the infrastructure behind Microsoft Azure, where small performance gains can affect cloud services used at massive scale. - Her career points to a larger industry issue: women remain underrepresented in hardware and performance engineering, even as demand for those skills grows. - Haridas also uses her experience to mentor others, which can help widen the pipeline into technical roles that shape cloud reliability and efficiency.

What happened: - Haridas is a Senior Platform System Engineer at Microsoft in Mountain View, California. - She leads performance validation for Azure’s Cobalt ARM-based server processors. - Her work focuses on the performance, efficiency, and reliability of Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure. - Her technical background includes CPU, system, server, cloud, software, post-silicon, GPU, and database performance. - Microsoft’s profile of Haridas was published Nov. 12, 2026.

The details: - Haridas earned a Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology from the University of Mumbai. - She later earned a Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of Colorado Denver. - She is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Computer Society of India. - Haridas speaks English, Hindi, and Marathi. - Before Microsoft, she spent six years at Intel. - At Intel, she evaluated next-generation CPU architectures, characterized enterprise database workloads, and provided performance insights for future processor work. - At Microsoft, Haridas led a cross-functional effort that increased Azure networking throughput by 50%. - She also designed AI-driven automation frameworks that uncovered more than 100 platform performance issues. - The automation work accelerated validation and improved platform quality for Azure deployments worldwide. - Haridas describes curiosity, persistence, and problem-solving as central to her approach. - She says her family’s emphasis on education helped shape her career path. - Her earlier leadership roles included Community Relationship Officer at Vidyalankar Institute of Technology, where she served as Convenor of the Vidyalankar Volunteering Committee. - In that role, she organized the Voteathon initiative to raise awareness of voter registration and led community education awareness efforts. - She also served as Project Leader at BHAU Institute of Technology in Pune, where she led a national-level social project teaching municipal school students. - Haridas’s profile is available through her Influential Women profile.

Between the lines: - Haridas frames her career as one built on courage first and confidence later. - That message fits a field where technical excellence can be overshadowed by lack of representation and limited visibility. - Her emphasis on performance engineering suggests a practical path for women entering hardware-adjacent roles, where impact can be measurable and immediate. - Her focus on mentorship signals that she sees representation as a systems problem, not just an individual one.

What’s next: - Haridas says young women should build fundamentals in both software and hardware before pursuing niche roles like performance engineering. - She encourages them to enter STEM fields before they feel fully ready, especially in spaces where representation is still limited. - Her continued work at Microsoft likely keeps her at the center of Azure performance tuning as cloud infrastructure demands rise. - Her mentoring focus suggests she will keep pushing for more women in hardware, cloud infrastructure, and systems engineering.

The bottom line: - Haridas has built a career around making cloud systems faster and more reliable while also trying to make hardware engineering more accessible to women.