Chris Sells mentions that MS has 25 SDE positions with the keyword “Avalon” advertised on their public job listings. Now, since I’m always interested in things Avalon related, I decide to search the complete job posts, and not just for SDE positions. What did I find but at total of 37 positions, of which one is for a Software Architect, 3 are for Program Managers, and one Program Manager Management. Now, the PMM spot is very interesting since in mentions the Nautilus Project Team:
Nautilus is a small, focused team within the Developer Division charged with creating exciting, new, leading edge tools targeting Longhorn. While components of Nautilus are slated to ship as part of Visual Studio and other future tools, we are building a complete framework and tool using a clean slate approach to architecture and user experience.
That little bit of info now begs me to search on Nautilus within the job postings, which brings back 5 positions. The PM position provides even more info about the Nautilus team:
Nautilus is creating a modular, highly-extensible architecture for development tools. A key pillar of this architecture is centralized metadata. Sophisticated development tools must integrate a wide variety of data such as project information, build descriptions, syntactic and semantic models of programs, source control data, and profiling results. You will be responsible for defining and executing the long-term plans for straightforward integration of data sources into the development environment and aggregated programmatic access to that data. Delivering the development metadata strategy and implementation will require working with architects across the Developer Division to understand the various data sources, metadata, and technologies being constructed and how they can be integrated. A deep understanding of development tools needs, end-user, and ISV customer scenarios is crucial.
Wow! That sure looks like NDA material to me (if I actually had heard of this project team prior to this search you I wouldn’t have blogged it, worrying about my NDA, but that isn’t the case so here it is). I’ve blogged about this before, corporations really need to monitor all public facing sites for NDA leaks, especially job postings.