Martin Hall

Professional Summary

Senior quality engineering and software-development leader with more than 18 years of experience building teams, improving engineering practices, and delivering products at scale, including more than a decade at Microsoft and Skype. Led international organizations spanning software development, SDET, mobile quality, automation, analytics, and application security. Delivered measurable improvements, including increasing mobile automation coverage from 0% to 85%, reducing regression cycles from five days to one, and accelerating releases from every two months to every two weeks. Particularly effective in complex or underperforming environments that need stronger quality strategy, engineering discipline, and execution

Career Timeline

Work Experience

Quality Engineering Manager

Denali AI — contracted to T-Mobile

Aug 2024 - Present

Bellevue, Washington

Led the test team and migrated from manual testing to automation-based testing. Also helped ship a new ground-up version of the Metro Mobile app, which, along with the T-Life app, is the primary way T-Mobile customers manage their plans and pay their bills.

Managing a team of 12 Quality Engineers / SDETs, consisting of on-site and remote employees, and working with a team of 8 Project / Program managers and up to 36 developers, mainly interfacing with the engineering managers and directors.
- Mobile application automation Android / iOS increased from 0% to 85% coverage.
- Release frequency increased from once every two months to fortnightly.
- Established a 99.9% crash-free user release threshold, supported by telemetry from Luciq / InstaBug, release gates, and production incident triage (RCA's)

Career Break — Family Caregiving

Sep 2023 - Aug 2024

Following a company-wide reduction at Microsoft, took planned full-time time with family before returning to engineering leadership.

Senior Engineering Lead / Manager

Microsoft

Nov 2014 - Sep 2023

Redmond, Washington

20% Senior SDET Lead and 80% Software Development Manager. I was brought over to the US to lead a team as part of Devices/Hardware org, working on one of the Surface products. I also worked on the team that migrated the Skype stack to the MS Teams stack I also created what is known today as the Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro product.

- Grew the Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro team from 2 to 36 engineers over five years, directly managing 18.
- Regression time reduced from five days to one day.
- Surface Hub, which was running 3 months behind, was released on time as part of Windows 10. We caught up 3 months of delay within 7 months by improving processes and had no dropped features or major hotfixes within 2 months of release.
- One of two founding engineers on the product that shipped as Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro — the management and licensing tier for a fleet of Microsoft rooms, publicly reported as passing 1M rooms (FY24 Q3). Two granted patents cover meeting-room operational maintenance and managed-rooms backbone services.

Senior Test Manager

Skype

Sep 2012 - Nov 2014

London, UK

Managed 6 different teams at Skype, ensuring quality was maintained across the apps on multiple platforms. Was in charge of authentication, Windows, iOS, and Android app home/landing pages, Customer feedback, and analytics teams.

- Managing a team of 36 Software Engineers, consisting of on-site and remote employees, as well as leading teams internationally (UK, Estonia, and Czech Republic)
- Zero attrition over 2 years
- Supported 11 engineers in earning annual internal promotions through structured mentoring, career planning, and expanded technical ownership
- One of my teams was the first at Microsoft to use a single code source for both Android and iOS automation. While this was a heavy lift initially, it allowed us to simplify the testing codebase and, in the long term, reduced the time needed for writing regression tests- time saved was about 42%
- Led the first machine learning team at Skype. My team also created Aria originally for Skype; Aria became the main analytics/telemetry SDK engine used at Microsoft, especially for Microsoft Office services, as part of Microsoft's One Data Strategy (1DS)

QA Manager - Cloud Security

Cisco Systems

Mar 2011 - Sep 2012

London, UK

Manager with ownership of quality for Cisco Cloud Web Security (formerly ScanSafe), the malware-detection and web-filtering service deployed across enterprises, including Google and GE. Managed 8 security test engineers; automated the cloud security portal to 94% coverage with Selenium; reduced escaped defects by 48.2%.

- Managing a team of 8 Security Test Engineers, all on-site.
- Introduced automation using Selenium to fully automate the Cisco cloud security portal, achieving 94% coverage.
- Built an active machine learning loop for malware classification; the model routed low-confidence samples to security analysts for labeling, with randomized audits on high-confidence predictions to catch silent misclassification, improving detection on compressed and oversized files that defeated static heuristics.
- Escaped defects down 48.2%.
This gave Cisco an advantage over other security vendors when dealing with compressed files and files too large to scan using standard heuristics.

System Test Manager

ThomsonLocal

Apr 2008 - Mar 2011

Farnborough, UK

Worked alongside the Alphabet / Google Maps and Local search teams, managing a team of testers for Google Local search in the UK.

- Managing an international team of 12 Test Engineers, 6 on-site and 6 in Ukraine
- Introduced automation to help scale testing. Also implemented a performance testing system that could simulate the loads we would see from Google, our main partner.
- 82% of manual tests converted to automation
- 84 hours of testing saved per release (fortnightly releases)

Certifications

ISTQB

Association for Testing and Software Quality Assurance Global Certification Body

SQL Database Foundations

Microsoft

SQL Database Advanced

Microsoft

Education

Business Studies

South Thames College

Majored in Business Studies and Accounting

Skills & Expertise

Programming Languages

C#PythonJavaScript / TypeScriptVB and VB.NetJavaShell scriptingPowerShellSQL

Automation Tools

AppiumRobot FrameworkPuppeteerSeleniumPlaywrightAzure Logic AppsPower AutomateAPI TestingPostmanScrapy

AI Frameworks

TensorFlowKerasPyTorchPerplexityLlamaIndexLLM Studio

AI Assisted Development

Claude CodeOpenAi CodexGithub CopilotKimi

Database Servers

Microsoft SQL ServerMySQLNoSQLKustoOracleMongoDBPostgreSQL

Featured Projects

Cerebral

My 2 Day Skype Hackathon Project using an EEG headset to make calls just by thinking call XXXX. No words need to be said, and no buttons need to be pressed. My code reads brain waves to categorize who you want to call

EEGAIMachine LearningC#

ZDNet report on Equifax Security incident

Interviewed about finding and researching security issues that I found on Equifax's domains in the aftermath of their breach.

SecurityRed TeamBlue TeamOWASP Top 10

Contributor to Google Hacking for Penetration Testers (Syngress)

Early contributor to the Google Hacking Database (GHDB) — the search-reconnaissance corpus behind Johnny Long's Google Hacking for Penetration Testers (Syngress), maintained today by OffSec as part of Exploit-DB. Credited in the book among the "Google Masters" as zoro25.

Web Security

First to discover a security vulnerability in Sony PlayStation 3

I was the first to discover a security vulnerability in the Sony PlayStation 3 via port knocking. I worked with Sony and Trend Micro to patch the issue in the V2.0 firmware, including a Trend Micro firewall, for the product. Credited under Anathema

Security Hall of Fame

Multiple recognitions from Google, Dropbox, Microsoft, Apple, Plex, Whitehat Security, Equifax, Meta, Sony and other enterprises I am one of a very select few Microsoft staff members added to the list while actively employed by MSFT. (Normally, internal staff are excluded from participating unless their found issue is very severe)