Chris Basoglu

Over a career spanning 30 years, Chris has led groundbreaking industry initiatives requiring specialized processing in areas such as AI, multimedia, real-time communications, medicine, and more. He currently serves as Vice President of Engineering at Microsoft in the AI Platform division. In addition to leading and developing high-performing teams, Chris is responsible for building and productizing Azure OpenAI inferencing for public API and Copilot scenarios.

Chris has also played a pivotal role in creating Microsoft’s first deep learning training clusters with job scheduling, developing the company’s open-source deep learning training toolkit, and advancing inferencing platforms for key AI services such as OpenAI (GPT‑3 and beyond), speech recognition, image recognition, and language understanding. His earlier work at Microsoft included contributions to real-time scheduling, parallel processing, audio and video processing, memory management, browser technologies, and end-to-end application hosting within Microsoft operating systems.

Chris earned both his Bachelor of Science and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington, specializing in multimedia, image, and signal processing algorithms as well as computer architecture. Before joining Microsoft, after graduation, he was an early employee of a fabless semiconductor startup becoming Vice President of Enginering over 10 years, and then later co-founding his own startup.  During this time, Chris’ efforts were focused on system-on-a-chip design, GPU acceleration, compute kernel optimization, multimedia streaming platforms, and FPGA-based multimedia processing for cellular base stations.