Sean Livingston

My professional career began in the Canadian Armed Forces, where I worked as soldier, electronics technician, network specialist, and computer technologies instructor. After almost 10 years of service, I decided on a change of career to leverage my mostly self-taught computer skills. I moved first to Houston and later Seattle to work as a consultant focusing on infrastructure and development using Microsoft Technologies. This time was spent working for several companies, including being a part owner of a start-up, and it enabled me to create positive impact for many clients in a variety of industries including within the travel, education, insurance, medical, funereal, and energy markets. Work in consulting brought me into close contact with early alpha versions of .Net framework plus languages, SharePoint, and Project Server, allowing me to gain an early advantage of expertise in these areas which I then used to the benefit of companies looking to do early adoption of the then emergent platforms.

I fulfilled a lifelong goal by joining Microsoft in 2005, initially to work as an engineer within Microsoft's own internal IT group to work on collaboration technologies including file shares, SharePoint, and Project Server. After dealing with hard won battles around upgrade to SharePoint 2007 and issues with maintenance of SharePoint 2003, I moved over to the SharePoint product group in early 2007 to work as a program manager with the task of improving the administration, upgrade, patching and security of the product line. I worked in this capacity, designing and delivering many improvements to the products until late 2012 when I took over a change of responsibility areas to focus on the then difficult task of performing data migrations into Office 365's SharePoint Online.

As of late 2014, I decided to pursue a slight career change yet again, and switch from the program manager role into the core software engineering role so as to focus on how to best deliver improvements into the SharePoint product both in the cloud and on-premises at a technical level.

I live with my wife, daughter, and pets in the greater Seattle area. I'm not just all about work though, as I enjoy video games, kite flying, and am also an avid paintball enthusiast who likes to combine my technology skills including robotics in unique ways to enhance the gameplay.