Who are you?

Hello!

My name is Michael Santacroce, and I’m currently (as of 3/12/2025) a Member of Technical Staff at Microsoft AI.

I pursue work that I find technically interesting and societally impactful. I love learning about and pushing the boundaries on all aspects of Deep Learning and Large Language Models. For the last ~2 years, I have focused mainly on LLM post-training (online and offline) and synthetic data generation. However, I’m interested in the full stack, from writing performant training code to pushing downstream performance using the latest algorithms and techniques.

It’s my firm belief that having an ever-expanding understanding of the full, end-to-end stack for model creation produces greater models.

I graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 2019 with a Bachelor’s and Master’s, both in Computer Engineering. Since then, I’ve been fortunate to learn from incredibly talented researchers and engineers while working on many projects. In this time, I’ve learned hard lessons and honed my skills, and I’m proud to be at MAI!

On this site you can find things that I’ve worked on, both professionally and for fun.