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

Ketki Haridas, a senior platform system engineer at Microsoft, leads performance validation for Azure’s ARM-based Cobalt processors and has helped deliver major throughput and efficiency gains. Her story also centers on the underrepresentation of women in hardware engineering and her push to mentor the next generation of women in STEM.

Why it matters: - Microsoft’s Azure cloud depends on hardware and software working together at scale, and Haridas’ role helps determine whether new silicon performs fast enough, efficiently enough and reliably enough for global cloud services. - Her work also speaks to a broader workforce gap: women remain underrepresented in hardware and performance engineering, a field that shapes the infrastructure behind modern computing.

What happened: - Ketki Haridas is a senior platform system engineer at Microsoft in Mountain View, California. - Haridas leads performance validation for Azure’s Cobalt ARM-based server processors. - Her work supports cloud services used by millions of people around the world. - Haridas has nearly a decade of experience in cloud computing, computer architecture and systems performance engineering. - She earned a bachelor’s degree in information technology from the University of Mumbai and a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Colorado Denver. - Haridas is a member of IEEE and the Computer Society of India. - She speaks English, Hindi and Marathi.

The details: - Before Microsoft, Haridas spent six years at Intel evaluating next-generation CPU architectures and characterizing enterprise database workloads. - At Microsoft, Haridas contributed to a 40% performance improvement on the Cobalt 100 processor. - She also led a cross-functional engineering effort that increased Azure networking throughput by 50% through investigation, experimentation and collaboration. - Those changes helped strengthen platform competitiveness, speed customer adoption of Cobalt and improve Azure’s revenue growth and operational efficiency. - Haridas also built AI-driven automation frameworks that identified more than 100 platform performance issues. - The automation work accelerated validation, supported earlier architectural improvements and improved the reliability and scalability of Azure deployments. - Her technical scope includes CPU, system, server, cloud, software, post-silicon, GPU and database performance. - Haridas also served as Community Relationship Officer at Vidyalankar Institute of Technology, where she was convenor of the Vidyalankar Volunteering Committee. - In that role, she organized the Voteathon initiative to promote voter registration awareness 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 focused on teaching municipal school students.

Between the lines: - Haridas frames her proudest achievement as resilience, not a single technical milestone. - As a woman in hardware and systems engineering, she often worked in rooms where few people shared her background. - She says curiosity, persistence and asking overlooked questions became strengths rather than obstacles. - Haridas credits her success to education, curiosity, independence and a family that valued learning. - She sees leadership as creating clarity, embracing challenges and helping others recognize their own potential.

What’s next: - Haridas is focused on mentoring aspiring engineers and encouraging more women to pursue hardware, cloud infrastructure and systems engineering. - Her advice to young women in tech is to build fundamentals in both software and hardware and not wait to feel fully ready before taking on opportunity. - She wants more engineers to pursue niche, high-impact roles such as performance engineering, where small improvements can translate into major cloud-scale gains. - Learn more about Ketki Haridas through her Influential Women profile.

The bottom line: - Haridas is using deep technical work at Microsoft to improve Azure’s performance while also pushing for a more inclusive pipeline into hardware engineering.