Luisa Santo

iOS Engineer | Consumer Products & AI Experiences

Profile

iOS engineer and Member of Technical Staff at Microsoft. Owns consumer features from design through implementation and rollout, including GroupMe messaging and AI experiences. Earlier work spans Teams architecture, the Peacock launch and developer support.

Engineering experience

Microsoft: GroupMe iOS

2024 - present

  • Owned redesigned profiles and swipe navigation on iOS; GroupMe reported over 1.2 billion product-wide profile views in 2025.
  • Delivered chat bubbles and light/dark theming, progressive AI image loading, and streaming summaries with caching, error handling and telemetry.
  • Implemented contextual feedback and optimistic poll updates with rollback. Built UI-test foundations with 63 tests in the end-of-2024 suite; fixed 17 accessibility issues in July 2026.

Microsoft: Teams iOS

2022 - 2024

  • Refactored legacy post-meeting logic into Swift components and testable view models, coordinating changes with partner teams.
  • Improved privacy-sensitive notification and file-handling behavior, and added post-meeting UI automation.

Microsoft: Developer Support

2021 - 2022

  • Led technical escalation support for Teams and Skype for Business developer scenarios across EMEA; built shared tools and onboarding resources.

Peacock: iOS Developer

Apr 2020 - Mar 2021

  • Contributed to the Peacock iPhone and iPad launch; implemented the highlights section and movie/show details UI.

Talkdesk: Software Engineer

May 2019 - Apr 2020

  • Contributed to a Ruby microservice before moving to iOS work on push notifications and Interface Builder; helped onboard new iOS engineers.

Technical leadership

Mentored two internship projects in 2024 and 2025, covering architecture, implementation, code review and communicating results. Also supported engineer onboarding and shared technical practice.

AI-assisted engineering

Writes task briefs and reusable instruction files with source checks, constraints and acceptance tests. Uses Copilot and review agents for implementation, debugging and review, with human oversight. Helps colleagues adopt AI-assisted development.

Education

Instituto Superior Técnico | MEng, Artificial Intelligence (2020); BEng, Computer and Information Sciences (2018).

AI coursework

DeepLearning.AI (2026): Generative AI for Software Development; AI Code Review; MCP: Build Rich-Context AI Apps with Anthropic; AI Prompting for Everyone.

Other experience

Evaluated speech-to-text tools for CERN's archives, comparing feasibility and limitations. Taught app development with App Inventor at Girls Code (2018-2020) and block-based programming at Happy Code (2018-2019). Additional project work involving Sky and Comcast.

Technical skills

Swift, Objective-C, UIKit, Swift Concurrency, MVVM-C, Core Data, REST APIs, WebSockets, caching, feature flags, telemetry, XCTest, UI automation, VoiceOver, accessibility, Git and GitHub Copilot.

Product-scale source: GroupMe, 2025 Year in Review. Profile views are product-wide, not an individual growth claim. Test and accessibility counts describe the dated work above, not career totals.