Understand before building
Start with the problem, the people affected, and the constraints that shape a useful solution.
Software engineer · Product-minded builder
Building products.
Engineering systems.
Driving meaningful outcomes.
I'm Bolton Opondo, a software engineer combining product thinking, technical depth and engineering ownership to build reliable, impactful software.
PRODUCT+SYSTEMS
THOUGHTFUL BY DESIGNBUILT TO MATTERSelected work
A few things I've worked on.
01 Professional
Building and Improving Production Feed Experiences
Product engineering on Microsoft Feed across web and mobile: shipping features, measuring engagement, and keeping the experience fast, accessible and reliable in production.
02 ProfessionalResearcher: Measuring and Improving AI Response Quality
Evaluation metrics for information density and temporal relevance, offline baselines and experiments, and investigations into why AI-generated reports lose context or fall short.
03 ProfessionalCopilot Citations: Improving Response Reliability
Citation handling and rendering, monitoring and telemetry, and reliability investigations into how sources travel from an AI response to the screen.
04 IndependentMemory Lab
Evaluating persistent memory for coding agents: a memory engine paired with an evaluation platform that asks whether past experience helps an agent on new tasks.
05 CommunityDare To Dream Africa
Volunteer website development for a community organisation, from AI-assisted early design exploration to guiding content and refining the site.
How I work
Engineering is more than implementation.
Think beyond implementation
Consider how a decision behaves in production, how it can fail, and how it can be maintained.
Take ownership of outcomes
Stay accountable to the quality and usefulness of the work, not only the code that ships.
Measure whether it works
Look for evidence that a change improved the experience; be candid when the evidence is not there.
Research & experiments
Questions before conclusions.
ExploringWhat Makes an Engineering Evaluation Useful?
A working question about the relationship between evaluation design, decision-making, and limitations.
Read research noteAbout
Curiosity, craft, and a sense of ownership.
Over seven years of building production software, from product engineering on Microsoft Feed to the quality, evaluation and reliability of AI-powered experiences. I'm drawn to the point where software engineering, system design and AI research engineering meet.
More about meNow · updated 2 November 2026
Current focus
Building: Memory Lab, an independent project that evaluates whether persistent memory helps coding agents on software engineering tasks.
Learning: Evaluation design, retrieval and grounding, and how to measure the quality of AI-powered experiences.
More about nowContact