Ethan Erickson

My second Microsoft internship involved developing an AI agent that performed comprehensive analyses of customer-reported incidents, identifying correct root causes for 50% of incidents. This internal tool was important to members of my team because it reduced time to mitigation by 50+ hours per incident. I created a Model Context Protocol server in C# that exposed tools to the AI agent for querying Kusto databases, reading Azure DevOps wiki pages, reading logs and code files, and finding similar historical incidents. I also established an Azure DevOps CI/CD pipeline using YAML to publish the MCP server to an internal package feed when new changes were pushed. This project forced me to reach out to many different on-call engineers to understand their pain points, and I had to collaborate closely with them and other team members to develop a useful tool.

My first Microsoft internship involved improving Microsoft's Security Token Service to enable flexible claim matching for workloads from 3rd parties (GitHub, GitLab, Terraform Cloud) to Azure. Shipping this feature into production was important because it was highly requested by large customers in AI and telecommunications. I Researched and benchmarked wildcard matching algorithms, optimizing worst-case scenarios to run less than 1 millisecond. I also wrote extensive unit tests, end-to-end tests, and published a NuGet used by the Azure App Model team. This project required me to learn about authentication protocols, read and understand a large codebase, and thouroughly test my code under a variety of edge cases.

At age nine, I learned to code through free computer science courses on Khanacademy and have since learned a variety of languages including JavaScript, Java, Python, C#, and C++. In 2019, I published a puzzle-solving video game on the Google Play store. In recent years, I have been working on an open-world spaceship shooter game in Unity, with a goal of publishing it on Steam.

I started running for the Rain City Flyers club at age seven and continued competing in cross country and track throughout all four years of high school. I was a cross country team captain during my senior season and helped my squad qualify and compete in the State championship meet in Pasco, Washington. Currently, I am an NCAA DII cross country and track athlete at Seattle Pacific University.

I enjoy crafting elaborate plots, primarily of the science fiction and adventure genres. I have self-published a fantasy novel and I am currently drafting a Sci-Fi novel about a rogue artificial intelligence. From 2019-2021, I participated three times in the National Novel Writing Month challenge and wrote 40,000+ words in a single month. I was an attorney for my high school Mock Trial team from 2021-2022, developing compelling arguments and questions to persuade the jury. I also love reading!

I learned to play piano at a young age, but did not start playing in a band until I joined a local Seattle JazzEd Ensemble in 2019. Although this was abridged by the pandemic, I soon became a pianist for my high school jazz band from 2020-2022. Around that time, I also played in a jazz combo every Sunday afternoon and performed at several small gigs. I also like to compose my own songs and beats.

My parents are both teachers, so it may be inevitable that I follow their lead. From 2020-2022, I participated in the Breakthrough Junior Challenge and explained complex computer science topics like pathfinding algorithms, neural networks, and SHA256 in short videos. I was team captain for an FRC robotics team and I enjoy helping classmates and friends with homework and computer problems.