Your Journey into XR Development - Careers in Mixed Reality, Eps.10

Our Mixed Reality and Spatial Computing Cloud Advocacy teams have come together to bring you a 10-part series dedicated to helping you get started with your XR development journey. Created with the true beginner in mind, this series has been curated to guide you along your journey in getting started with XR featuring sessions for both developers and non-developers alike. Join us for our biweekly Microsoft Reactor series where we'll explore a different area of XR development.

Part 10 of 10
Join us for a panel discussion to learn more about careers in XR. During this live event, we'll meet with members from the Mixed Reality team at Microsoft who'll share their experiences from working in the industry. We'll also hear from recruiters to learn more about how you can set yourself up for success to find your next role in XR.

Moderator:
April Speight, Sr. Cloud Advocate - Spatial Computing

April Speight is a developer, speaker, and educator who believes that creating for XR should be accessible for all. She leads the Spatial Computing Cloud Advocacy team at Microsoft. In addition, she is also the Director of Community and Education Outreach for the CyberXR Coalition - an organization formed to address the global necessity of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the cybersecurity and XR domain.

Panelists:
Eric Brown, Sr. Mixed Reality Technical Solutions Specialist

Eric is a Sr. Mixed Reality Technical Solutions Specialist at Microsoft, helping business and technical decision-makers understand the possibilities of Mixed Reality and the Metaverse on the Microsoft platform. As a digital advisor, he helps teams envision, prove value, and deploy Mixed Reality solutions at an enterprise scale.
His mission is to use Innovation for Equity. Creating opportunities for access and success for historically underrepresented populations. This lifework empowers the next generation of leaders, dreamers, and doers to realize and nurture their purpose and potential.

Sean Kerawala, Program Manager

Sean Kerawala is the lead PM for Mixed Reality Content & Learning, developing content that our customer need in order to discover, design, develop, and deploy mixed reality technologies. He began his career in a Seattle-based ed-tech startup working across Engineering, Finance, and Ops - supporting it's $15M acquisition. He then transitioned to Azure Commerce and Ecosystems to support Azure Portal modernization in a User Acceptance Testing PMO, an effort that reached millions of Devs and IT admins. Now in Mixed Reality, he leads a team of 3 tech writers and a designer who have collectively increased MR content viewership by 300% YoY.

Desirée Lockwood, Sr. Product Marketing Manager

Desirée Lockwood is a passionate audience marketer who became unwittingly enamored by developer communities while transitioning from a career as a Marketing Consultant. For nearly a decade she has worked to engage and understand the needs of programmers who build cloud solutions, enterprise LOB applications, commercial software, PC games and mobile apps. The magic of HoloLens combined with the unique energy of mixed reality development communities drew her to focus solely in that space since 2020.

Heidi Rankich, Sr. Recruiter

Heidi Rankich- Sr. Recruiter at Microsoft with 15 years in the industry. I started at Microsoft in 2006, left in 2012 and went to support a JV between Microsoft and GE Healthcare, then ended up back “home” 5 years ago. I had been primarily supporting the Azure CXP and OCTO organizations, but recently came to support the Mixed Reality organization. I live in central Washington with my husband and 4 year-old son, and we have a new puppy named Bandit.