Harley Adams
Architect · Xbox Developer Organization
Building progression and multiplayer services for the Xbox Network.
- Seattle, WA
- harley.g.adams [at] gmail.com
- in/harleyadams
- @Harley-Adams
- harleyadams.dev
Summary
I'm a cloud architect working on Xbox and PlayFab. I built and run the Achievements, Leaderboards, Stats and Time Played services, which serve 200,000 requests per second across the Xbox Network. Right now my focus is Xbox's next platform generation.
Experience
Microsoft2016 – Present
Architect, Xbox Developer Organization2025 – Present
- Leading the migration of legacy Xbox Live services onto a cloud-native AKS stack, and setting the direction other teams build against.
- Designing the next generation of Achievements, using AI to give players more meaning behind the achievements they earn.
Tech Lead & Senior Software Engineer, Xbox / PlayFab2020 – 2025
- Tech lead for Xbox Time Played and PlayFab Stats and Leaderboards v2.
- Owned the architecture decisions and led the implementation, from design through to running these services in production.
- Re-architected the Achievements backend to eliminate player data loss, moving it to at-least-once delivery so unlocks survive failures.
Software Engineer II, Microsoft Sway2016 – 2020
- Built Sway's Author Analytics platform: client-side tracking, ingestion endpoints, Azure Stream Analytics, SQL storage. Authors could see how people read their Sways.
- Worked on accessibility across Sway, and triaged and fixed externally reported security vulnerabilities.
Fiserv2015 – 2016
Junior Software Engineer
- Wrote C# / .NET backend services for mobile banking apps, plus the pipelines that deployed them.
Ninja Kiwi2013
Game Developer
- Junior developer on Bloons Monkey City and SAS: Zombie Assault 4.
Projects
PuzzleTime (Web)
- A web version of my iOS puzzle app, starting with Wordle: daily and random modes, on-screen and physical keyboard input, hints, stats, streaks and shareable results. No backend and no account — it all lives in your browser. React and TypeScript. Play it.
Run Box Run
- An Android game I wrote at university and put on the Play Store. No engine, no frameworks, just Java and the Android APIs.
Skills
- Programming: C# / .NET 8 · Python · JavaScript / TypeScript · PowerShell · Bash
- Architecture & Leadership: Distributed systems design · live-service reliability · technical direction · mentorship
- Cloud & Infra: Azure Kubernetes Service · Docker · Bicep · Terraform · Cosmos DB · Event Hubs · Redis · Grafana · Prometheus · Locust · Azure Load Testing
- AI: Leading AI adoption for engineers across the Xbox Developer organization.