Microsoft is opening a Mixed Reality and AI engineering office in Lagos, Nigeria

Mar 11, 2019

engineering office

Microsoft is opening an engineering office to build Mixed Reality Cloud Services in Lagos, Nigeria.

UPDATE: Microsoft announces software engineering team at its Africa Development Center site in Lagos will develop Azure services that power new Augmented Reality.

Microsoft is increasing its investments on African soil. It is launching two development centers in Africa. With offices in Kenya and Nigeria. Early this month Microsoft’s planned Africa datacenters became a reality and went live in South Africa.
Last year in partnership with Techno Brain Limited Microsoft opened Africa’s first Software Testing Centre in Kenya. It also opened its first Africa customer service support center in Lagos, Nigeria in partnership with Tek Experts.

The latest announcement was highlighted by Alex Kipman, Microsoft’s technical fellow for AI and Mixed Reality. Alex is known as the man behind Microsoft HoloLens. A software engineering job posting on Microsoft’s career page gives more details about this.

The role description says Microsoft is launching a “Cognition Africa engineering team to build Mixed Reality Cloud Services”. And asks software engineers who meet the qualifications to apply.

Here’s what the job posting tells us about the Mixed reality and AI engineering office in Lagos.

We are launching a Cognition Africa engineering team to build Mixed Reality Cloud Services that bring those technologies to a wider range of devices. Do you want to join us on this journey? We are offering opportunities for passionate Software Engineers to help us build the team and suite of cloud services which bring these capabilities to the cloud“.

Alex Kipman in his tweet also says “looking forward to my first visit soon“. I want to believe we might have a HoloLens 2 showcase event in town soon. Microsoft unveiled the HoloLens 2 recently at the 2019 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.