Hi, I'm Dylan Clark. I'm a Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft, based in Cambridge, MA. I build backend services, shared frameworks, and great developer experiences.
What I'm buildingI'm currently building the service that powers Outlook integration across Microsoft's agentic experiences.
I joined Microsoft after graduating from Harvard in 2018 and started in desktop Outlook, working in C++. Since then, I've helped build a shared WebView2 application hosting framework used by Outlook, Copilot, OneDrive, and other Microsoft products. I discovered an affinity for carefully designing APIs and helping partners leverage a shared solution.
I've had the privilege to help drive multiple products from internal proof-of-concepts to worldwide deployments with tens of millions of users. My work has spanned desktop app development in both legacy and brand-new codebases, remote distributed services started from scratch, and even some frontend UX work when needed. I've also spent years owning the work that keeps the team building and ensures releases are dependable: build systems, staged rollouts, compliance, and monitoring.
How I workI'm a generalist, though I have fondness for backends and shared frameworks. Given a hard problem and something useful to build, I can build consensus around a plan, motivate a team, and deliver reliable and maintainable software to partners or customers.
Sometimes this involves leading a cross-team effort; sometimes it means pairing with someone or digging into an unfamiliar service myself. I care about being a patient and uplifting teammate. Mentoring engineers and helping them take ownership of bigger problems has become one of my favorite parts of the job.
AI has become an indispensable partner in my work. I build tools and agentic workflows with a focus on developer experience and reliability.
There are so many opportunities to leverage agents to help teams do their best work; I've built automation for the generation of deterministic compliance artifacts, pushed partners to modernize their workflows for the AI-development era, and shared best practices to help those around me succeed in this time of rapid change. I like finding the repeated friction in a team's day and building something that gets it out of the way.
Tools and interests- C#/.NET, modern C++, TypeScript, React, and anything you can throw at me
- MCP, coding agents, and developer experience for AI
- Azure services, Docker, Kubernetes-based infrastructure, and infrastructure as code
- Windows and Mac desktop app development, WebView2
- CMake, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, and all the other tools that get thrown together to ship code
- APIs people can understand, useful telemetry, and systems that someone besides the author can maintain
I'm especially motivated to apply AI to the everyday work that still involves too much friction so people can spend more time being productive and intellectually engaged. If you're building something interesting, I'd love to hear about it.
Email: dylanmclark (at) outlook (dot) com