Yousef Khalidi is a Distinguished Engineer on Microsoft's Windows Azure team. Windows Azure is a platform for developing, deploying, managing, and hosting cloud-based Web services. Yousef is responsible for several aspects of the platform, centered on the goal of building a low-cost, automated, large-scale computing system, using commodity hardware, with efficiently managed shared resources. Before Windows Azure, Yousef led an advanced development team in Windows that tackled a number of related operating-system areas, including application model, resource management, and isolation. He also served as a member of the Windows Core Architecture group.

Before joining Microsoft, Yousef was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. During his 14 years' tenure at Sun, he held several development, architecture, and management positions in Sun's software division, as well as in Sun Labs. Yousef was chief technology officer and chief architect of Solaris, chief architect and director of the Sun Cluster product line, and chief architect of Sun's N1 utility computing initiative, as well as a principal architect of Solaris MC and Spring operating systems. He shipped several releases of Sun Cluster and the Solaris operating system and has worked on system management software, high-speed networking, and memory-management hardware designs.

Yousef has published works in several areas, including operating systems, high availability, distributed systems, object-oriented software, high-speed networking, memory management, and computer architecture. He holds 30 patents in these areas. Yousef holds a Ph.D. and an MS in Information and Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in Atlanta.