Harley Adams
Architect · Xbox Developer Organization
Architecting Xbox Gameplay Services and the AI engineering practices behind them.
- Seattle, WA
- harley.g.adams [at] gmail.com
- in/harleyadams
- @Harley-Adams
- harleyadams.dev
Summary
I architect the Xbox services behind Achievements, Leaderboards, Stats and Time Played, which together handle 200,000 requests per second on the Xbox Network. I also lead AI-native engineering adoption across the 300-person Xbox Developer organization, and built the autonomous agents that first respond to incidents on my services.
Experience
Microsoft2016 – Present
Architect, Xbox Developer Organization2025 – Present
- Shipped Mythic Achievements to every Xbox player in the October 2026 update, as lead engineer of a 12-person working group across product, client engineering and services. Led a full rewrite of the Achievements backend and a zero-downtime backfill of Mythic status for more than 1 billion players across more than 16,000 titles. AI reviewed designs and plans before coding started, and GitHub Copilot generated 100% of the committed code.
- Made AI code generation, plan validation and code review the default way the 300-person Xbox Developer organization builds services, driving adoption through org-wide technical demos and walkthroughs. Every pull request now gets an AI review before a human sees it.
- Cut incident time-to-mitigate on my services by 80% by making autonomous SRE agents the first responder on every incident. Built on Azure SRE Agent with production read access, they correlate logs, metrics, Kubernetes state and Azure resource health. 6 teams now use the skill and agent practices I established.
- A dozen Xbox services now run on the AKS platform I built and maintain for the migration of legacy Xbox Live services, with Istio ingress and service mesh and Prometheus and Grafana observability tuned as production load grew.
Tech Lead & Senior Software Engineer, Xbox / PlayFab2020 – 2025
- Designed and shipped Xbox Time Played, which tracks play time for every title on Xbox, and PlayFab Stats and Leaderboards v2, which now power titles including Minecraft and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.
- Drastically reduced player data loss in the legacy Achievements service by introducing eventual consistency with at-least-once delivery.
Software Engineer II, Microsoft Sway2016 – 2020
- Built Sway's Author Analytics end to end so authors could see how people read their Sways, from client-side tracking through Azure Stream Analytics to SQL storage.
Earlier2013 – 2016
- Fiserv: C# / .NET backend services and deployment pipelines for mobile banking apps.
- Ninja Kiwi: Game developer on Bloons Monkey City and SAS: Zombie Assault 4.
Projects
PuzzleTime
- Real-time online versus and cross-play between web and iOS, built entirely on PlayFab with no custom game server. React and TypeScript. Play it.
Skills
- Programming: C# / .NET · Python · JavaScript / TypeScript
- Cloud & Infra: Azure Kubernetes Service · Istio · Docker · Bicep · Terraform · Cosmos DB · Event Hubs · Redis · Grafana · Prometheus
- AI Engineering: AI-native development workflows · AI code review & plan validation · agent & skill authoring · Azure SRE Agent · GitHub Copilot · MCP · guardrails for production-access agents