Tito Martinez

When you talk with Tito, the first thing you will likely notice is calm and kind demeanor. He speaks confidently, but with a tone of understanding and compassion. It comes as no surprise then, that Tito’s start within the IT world began as an Assistant Director at a children’s daycare.

Tito worked throughout high school and college in daycare programs. When in college, he would start his day early so his class schedule aligned with the local elementary. After class, he would head straight to work at a local afterschool program. It was happenstance that a local IT company was just across the street.

Majoring in Computer Information Services, Tito chose all his electives to be based in computer science; when one of his coworkers turned out to be the daughter of an employee at the IT company, Tito was excited to learn more. She introduced him to her father to review his resume who offered to help him prepare for life after college.

As a college student on a tight budget, Tito’s flimsy canary yellow paper was the only printer paper he had, and Tito submitted his resume for review – neatly printed on it. He later learned the person reviewing his resume was an executive at the company, and not impressed by the bright stationery. After some feedback and purchasing high-end resume paper that still lives on Tito’s shelf to this day, Tito was hired as their “PC guy” before he left college.

Before long, Tito found himself leading client-server classes to groups of tenured mainframe programmers. During his career within the IT field, Tito led with the same passion for IT, and composure and patience as a childcare provider. He often found himself in roles where he was a subject matter expert, and he was able to work independently to solve complex issues. Now, Tito enjoys working within groups, leading teams, and solving complex problems leveraging his subject matter expert experiences.

What Tito loves about CSE at Microsoft is that he can combine his passion for programming while working with others and leading a team to achieve a goal. Tito describes Technical Program Managers as a “Swiss Army Knife” and that is the perfect summary for Tito’s skills: he can pull definitive metrics and goals from ambiguous requests and constraints, all while encouraging both himself and his team to learn new technologies. When asked about his favorite part of any project, he replied “I am happiest when my team is excited about a project and learning something new”.