Joel Martinez is a Principal Software Engineering Manager with over two decades of experience spanning developer tooling, AI, cloud platforms, mobile, and the game industry. He is currently leading teams that are building software at Microsoft for Startups, where he helps bring new ideas to life in support of early-stage founders.

While at Microsoft Learn, his team shipped key products including the AI-powered “Ask Learn” question-answering service and a new green-field implementation of Microsoft Q&A, which launched with zero outage incidents. Prior to that, Joel worked on Azure documentation systems, cognitive search integrations, and developer experience tooling.

Joel’s earlier career includes work at Xamarin, where he developed custom CMS solutions and maintained core documentation tools like mdoc, as well as at About.com, where he led development of mobile applications for iOS and Android. He’s also contributed to the finance and healthcare sectors, developed training systems for medical simulation labs, and built games for Xbox Live Indie Games and Windows Phone independently after having worked for Electronic Arts where he built content and audio tools for Superman Returns: The Game.

An advocate for community and mentorship, Joel founded the Orlando .NET User Group and helped grow it into one of the largest developer communities in Central Florida. He has spoken at numerous events, contributed to open source projects, and authored multiple technical books.

His work is driven by a passion for learning, empowering others, and creating systems that scale knowledge and capability—whether through code, teams, or platforms.