My name is Miles, I’m a Principal Product Manager at Microsoft where I own Fabric Spark performance and compute features.

After getting my bachelor’s degree in Economics, I started my career with a short stint in Finance (which was extremely boring) where I learned that I enjoyed automation and learning data systems through automating our month-end financial reporting. Power BI came out and I quickly became shadow IT through using unapproved tooling with source data processes that were held together via duck-tape and vibes. That eventually turned into a formal BI Developer role where I later got approval to build my company’s first data warehouse in Azure (with zero prior experience). After a very successful implementation, I joined a consulting company so that I could keep building.

I was a die hard cloud data warehouse guy and ironically was one of the most anti-Spark people on our delivery team. After being forced to use Spark Structured Streaming for a customer use case, I was blown away by the capabilities, started exclusively using Apache Spark, and repented of my former strong opinions.

Dozens of implementations later, and after a shift from consulting to product management, I have no shortage of new opinions and lessons learned along the way. I love talking about lakehouse architecture, everything Delta Lake, streaming architectures, pro-dev habits, and helping people get the most out of Apache Spark and the best of OSS.

On the personal side, I’m a husband and father of 3 and in my free time I do a lot of reading, house remodeling, I brew beer, make sausage, sourdough bread, smoke all sorts of meats, and try to exercise enough to compensate for all of my food hobbies.

Certifications