Training security algorithms falls to people like Ram Shankar Siva Kumar, a Microsoft manager who goes by the title of Data Cowboy. Siva Kumar joined Microsoft six years ago from Carnegie Mellon after accepting a second-round interview because his sister was a fan of “Grey's Anatomy,” the medical drama set in Seattle. He manages a team of about 18 engineers who develop the machine learning algorithms and then make sure they’re smart and fast enough to thwart hackers and work seamlessly with the software systems of companies paying big bucks for Microsoft cloud services.
Siva Kumar is one of the people who gets the call when the algorithms detect an attack. He has been woken in the middle of the night, only to discover that Microsoft’s in-house “red team” of hackers were responsible. (They bought him cake to compensate for lost sleep.)