# A Career Journey from Cryptanalysis Research to SRE and Chief Editor at Microsoft

DevFeed: [A Career Journey from Cryptanalysis Research to SRE and Chief Editor at Microsoft](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/navigating-the-ocean-32261.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://medium.com/data-science-at-microsoft/navigating-the-ocean-ef276deeed8c?source=rss----a6e43238cdaf---4>)

Author: Alexandra Savelieva

Published: 2026-07-07T07:16:01Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Data Science at Microsoft](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/data-science-at-microsoft.md>)

Topics: [Data Science](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/data-science.md>), [Microsoft](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/microsoft.md>), [Cryptography](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/cryptography.md>), [site-reliability-engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/site-reliability-engineering.md>), [Algorithms, Complexity](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/algorithms-complexity.md>), [audit trail](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/audit-trail.md>)

Tags: [ai](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai.md>), [algorithms](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/algorithms.md>), [audit-trail](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/audit-trail.md>), [careers](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/careers.md>), [crack](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/crack.md>), [data-science](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/data-science.md>), [logs](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/logs.md>), [machine-learning](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/machine-learning.md>), [microsoft](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/microsoft.md>), [paper](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/paper.md>), [sre](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/sre.md>)

## AI overview

The author reflects on becoming chief editor of Microsoft's Data Science + AI online publication and recounts a career spanning cryptanalysis research, Bing Ads R&D, and site reliability engineering.

## Source excerpt

Thoughts on taking the helm of DS@MImage by the author (generated with ChatGPT). This week marks an important chapter of Data Science + AI at Microsoft, as well as in my own professional journey, as I step into the role of chief editor of this online publication after the farewell of its wonderful founder, Casey Doyle. This change is not something that I had planned -- rather it's a combination of unexpected circumstances have come together to make it happen, like many other things that have shaped my career and enabled this opportunity. If you read Casey's farewell article from last week, you may see why a metaphor of navigating the ocean came to mind when I was thinking about what's next for DS@M now that I'm "captaining the ship." The first chapter of my journey took place in 2010 as a Ph.D. intern in Microsoft Research. Under the supervision of Dmitry Khovratovich, I studied block hash functions. The paper that I coauthored ended up making a big splash in cryptanalysis (see Biclique attack -- Wikipedia), and a fun fact is that it took two years and several rejections at conferences and workshops for it to be recognized. Our approach involved surprisingly simple math and deterministic algorithms to crack a problem that was previously considered a "puzzle" requiring some craft with a bit of luck to solve. This was my main takeaway from the internship: twist and dissect the complex problems until they get reduced to an intuitively understood form, so that solving them becomes a matter of applying the right calculus. I returned in October 2012 as a full-time employee in Bing Ads R&D. I was expecting an applied research job and ended up as an SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) in the Audit Trail service working with logs collected for customer ads. It was "type 2" fun work -- absolutely not fun in the moment, but exciting when I look back. It served as a practical crash course that left the "bible" of SRE imprinted in my brain: how to design services for reliability, how t