Rachel Yehezkel

Rachel’s path to Microsoft was unusual to say the least. At just 18-years-old, she was a logistics officer for the Israeli army where she was in charge of moving large vehicles around the country. She managed the whole transportation, food, fuel and equipment supply chain for a big division, which meant if she forgot to place an order the soldiers wouldn’t eat! Anything Rachel was going to do after this job would be a piece of cake.

Growing up, Rachel wanted to be a building architect, but her brother and dad would say to her “you’re good at math, you should go into technology”. And because she always wanted to be like her big brother, she followed in his footsteps to be a software engineer. Post-college, she took a graveyard shift job monitoring Israeli government websites for cyberattacks where she learned all about networking and security. When a software engineer position opened up, she jumped at the chance. In this role, she mastered the ins and outs of the Microsoft stack.

She used this knowledge to land her first gig with Microsoft in 2007, she was so excited to join the company. Her first role in the company was Technical Account Manager in Microsoft Premier support organization. After 4 years, she was ready to pursue a product-focused role, she worked with software companies, mostly startups, to help them build and deploy their cloud workloads to Windows Azure.

She had the chance to join CSE and one of her first projects tied with interesting industry – gaming. She was part of the team asked to help Age of Ascent create a record-breaking amount of gamers online at the same time – she spent two months in the UK to prepare the cloud environment to do it. Sadly, they didn’t break the Guinness Book of World Records not because they couldn’t technically support it. Over a decade later, Rachel has spent many years working on the technical side of Azure. She played a key role in getting security giant, Check Point, to bring their solution to Azure Marketplace, ready for production – a project she is very proud of.

Rachel balances her career while raising a six-month-old baby and a toddler. In her rare spare time, Rachel helps her partner in life, an industrial designer, with coding on his 3D printing and CNC machine endeavors. And she still loves to talk shop with her dad and brother.