Ruth Bacci

I'm incredibly excited to share that I’ve joined Checkout.com to lead strategic engagements with our largest enterprise customers! Having led the partnership between Microsoft and Checkout.com last year, I had the opportunity to see firsthand what really makes this team so special: a deep understanding of customers' businesses, a genuine commitment to their priorities, and the ability to turn complex payments challenges into opportunities for growth. Joining Checkout.com felt like a natural and exciting next step! I’m looking forward to building closer relationships with new and existing customers, helping them navigate the opportunities ahead, and bringing that same combination of partnership, expertise and ambition to even more enterprise businesses looking to scale!! I’ll be in Nashville next week attending MAG/Merchant Advisory Group and would love to connect with merchants and industry friends while I'm there. Looking forward to seeing many of you there! 🚀 Guillaume Pousaz Cyril Chemla Mariano Albera Rory O'Neill Meron Colbeci Antoine Nougué Ashley Paulus Jules Gay

👨‍💻 Day 1 down. Three to go. The Microsoft EMEA Builders Hackathon kicked off yesterday in Copenhagen — 26 hacking teams from 20+ countries, four days, and a shared goal: turn ideas into working solutions. Developers, engineers and technical leaders went straight into GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Fabric and Foundry, alongside our featured partners Aikido Security, Fireworks AI, Lovable, n8n and UiPath. And they're not building alone: clinic experts from Microsoft and every partner are fully dedicated to supporting each and every team, on demand, throughout the week. What struck me on day one was the energy in the room and how quickly it turned into focus. Every team is building toward a real challenge outcome, and you could feel that intent from the first hour. Huge thanks to everyone flying in. 🙏 Now the real work begins. 🔨✨ 26 teams, one week. What are you building? #MicrosoftEMEA #Hackathon #Copenhagen #GitHubCopilot #MicrosoftFabric #AI #MSFTAdvocate

Proud to have graduated from the Azure Master Architect Program with a Certificate of Distinction. Being selected to join a 34-person cohort of talented colleagues from across EMEA made the experience particularly meaningful. For my capstone, I designed and built an AI-driven Talent Intelligence Platform for a pan-European professional services firm, taking it from research and business case through end-to-end architecture, implementation and validation of the expected business outcomes over 90 days. What made this experience particularly valuable was the opportunity to put years of architectural experience into practice in a different way: taking full ownership of the journey from business problem to working solution, within a highly compressed timeframe, with AI embedded throughout the process. AI accelerated every stage of the journey, from research and exploring architectural options to implementation and iteration. It was a powerful demonstration of how AI can amplify individual capability and fundamentally change the pace and scale at which we can turn ideas into working solutions. But increased speed and capability make human judgement even more important. AI can accelerate the work, but the human remains in the driving seat, providing context, challenging assumptions, making trade-offs and ultimately remaining accountable for decisions and outcomes. A sincere thank you to the leadership team who sponsored and supported my nomination: ☁️Henrique Moniz de Aragão, Tom Harmer, Jamel Gafsi, Ph.D., Greg Purcell, Katherine Lightner and Hakan Onur. And a special thank you to the Azure Master Architect leadership team: Mervyn Cunningham, Amit Agrawal, Jennifer Rheder, Niki Ozment Buchanan, Debbi Hoehn for creating such a challenging and rewarding experience. A fantastic journey, and one I’m looking forward to building on as we help customers rethink what individuals and organisations can achieve when AI amplifies human expertise. #Azure #AI #CloudArchitecture #Microsoft #Architecture

25 years at Microsoft! But it doesn't feel like it. I've been lucky to keep finding work that I enjoy, new things to learn and great people to learn them from. And somehow, 25 years went by.

We're hiring an Associate Robotic Automation Engineer in Manchester. This is a great opportunity to enter an industry where your work directly accelerates scientific discovery and improves lives. Apply below:

I recently completed Microsoft’s Azure Master Architect program. Seeing my cohort share their experiences here made me want to share a little of mine, and thank the people who helped me along the way. The program takes you from a complex case study to a working solution. You have to design the architecture, build it, and explain your decisions to a C level panel, including the trade-offs and what still needs work. My project was The Republic of Science. It tackles a question: how can universities find and use each other’s research without having to put all their sensitive data in one central place? I built an Azure-based pilot for a European university consortium, using synthetic data. It supports research discovery across five languages, helps identify collaboration opportunities and uses AI to assist with evidence review and research-funding compliance. The architecture is designed to keep sensitive data with the institution that owns it, sharing only approved evidence and catalogue information. AI helps with the analysis, but it doesn’t get to approve access or make the final decisions. Those stay with people. A special thank you to Santiago Freitas, Omar Shboul, Hussein Faour for sponsoring me and supporting my participation. I really appreciate your trust and the opportunity. Thank you to the program organizers, facilitators and mentors for your time, guidance and challenging questions. And to my fellow cohort members, thank you for sharing your knowledge so generously. Learning alongside you was a big part of the experience. Congratulations to everyone. Glad to have been part of this group, and let’s stay in touch! Thanks to all program owners and our LT team for providing this opportunity. Mark Chaban Niki Ozment Buchanan Mervyn Cunningham Jennifer Rheder Amit A #AzureMasterArchitect #Azure #CloudArchitecture #ResponsibleAI

Last week in Prague, I graduated from Microsoft's Azure Master Architect (AMA) Programme, receiving a Certification of Distinction as part of the inaugural EMEA cohort. Earlier this year, I was honoured to be selected as one of 34 Microsoft Solution Engineers and Cloud Solution Architects from across EMEA to participate in this premier architecture development programme. Over 90 days, we were challenged to apply technical expertise, strategic thinking, and business acumen to solve complex customer problems and drive meaningful outcomes. The programme began with little more than a one-page business brief. Three months later, we were expected to present a fully architected solution, and a deployed solution to a CxO-level panel. My capstone project focused on designing a sovereign AI platform for a pan-European media and broadcasting group. The solution, MediaSphereIQ, enables cross-archive content discovery, rights-aware personalisation, and responsible AI integration within editorial workflows. Without question, this was one of the most challenging assignments I have undertaken in my career. The domain was deliberately outside my industry expertise and required extensive research into new business models, operating practices, and regulatory requirements. Balancing the programme alongside a demanding customer-facing role meant many evenings and weekends were devoted to learning, designing, building, testing, and refining the solution. One of the most fascinating aspects of the project was the role of AI itself. A few years ago, delivering a project of this scale as a single architect would have been almost impossible. AI dramatically accelerated research, requirements analysis, architecture design, coding, testing, and operations. At the same time, the experience reinforced an equally important lesson: while AI can significantly amplify productivity, the skills developed over decades of architecture and engineering remain as relevant as ever. Understanding business outcomes, making sound architectural decisions, managing complexity, governing risk, and communicating effectively with stakeholders remain fundamentally human responsibilities. I would like to thank my management team, particularly Tracy Royle andKatherine Lightner, for their support, encouragement, and thank Greg Purcell, and Tom Harmer for supporting my nomination. Thank you also to Amit Agrawal , Jennifer Rheder, Andreea Maria Popa, Mervyn Cunningham, Brian Pendergrass, Debbi Hoehn, and everyone involved in running and supporting the programme. Most importantly, thank you to my fellow AMA EMEA cohort members. The quality of the discussions, collaboration, and shared learning made this an unforgettable experience. Now it's time to take those learnings forward and help customers accelerate their own AI transformation journeys #AzureMasterArchitect

Super proud of all of the hard work by a bunch of teams across @Microsoft which lead to this recognition by Gartner as _the_ leader in completeness of vision for container management. https://lnkd.in/gX_g_FGN

A common assumption in cloud architecture is that three Azure Availability Zones are always the right answer for production workloads. The reality is more nuanced. ​ Resiliency isn't achieved by applying the same pattern everywhere. It comes from understanding the requirements of each workload component and choosing the right design to meet them. ​ I've recently published two posts that explore the considerations behind two-zone, three-zone, and service-managed zone-resilient architectures, along with practical guidance for making those decisions. ​ The first covers the design framework: 𝘛𝘸𝘰 𝘻𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘦𝘦? 𝘈 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘯 𝘧𝘳𝘢𝘮𝘦𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘻𝘰𝘯𝘦-𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘈𝘻𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬𝘭𝘰𝘢𝘥𝘴 ​ The second goes deeper into pattern selection: Choosing two-zone and three-zone patterns for zone-resilient Azure workloads (https://lnkd.in/gNbFYimx)