Speaker Bio

Kurt Niebuhr is a Principal PDM Manager at Microsoft and manages the HPC/AI Software team in Azure Engineering’s Specialized Compute division. In this role, Kurt leads the team responsible for building cluster & job orchestration tools for the specific needs of running training, simulation, and inferencing jobs at scale on CPUs, FPGAs, and GPUs. As an extension of this core responsibility, Kurt helped direct Azure Engineering’s response to meet the demands of customers and partners on ~30 AD/ADAS projects since 2017. The focus of these engineering-driven engagements with start-ups, tier 1s, OEMs, chip/sensor makers, and public agencies was to architect robust, agile, and resilient autonomy stack dev/test environments on the cloud.

Prior to joining the Azure Engineering HPC/AI team and relocating to Redmond, Washington in 2016, Kurt worked at Microsoft Japan for 5 years and closely collaborated with a Japanese automotive OEM to define one of the first cloud-based telematics platforms for connected vehicle services.

Before Microsoft, Kurt spent nearly 10 years at Dassault Systemes Japan and worked predominately with automotive and aerospace companies in the CAD/CAE space. Kurt began his career bouncing across a few start-ups that didn’t survive the dot.com-bomb of the early 2000s.