— Xbox Chief Operating Officer Helen Chiang has suddenly left Microsoft after 21 years with the company, just months after landing the role in July. Her past roles include leading Mojang and the Minecraft franchise.

Verge first reported the news on Friday, citing a memo from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma that did not disclose the reason for her departure.

An Xbox spokesperson was likewise mum on details. “We don’t discuss individual personnel matters. We’re grateful for Helen’s years of service and wish her well,” the company said in an email to GeekWire.

Xbox has undergone a massive reorganization that included Chiang’s appointment, roughly 3,200 job cuts through the fiscal year — about 20% of the Xbox workforce — the spinoff of four game studios and a plan to dramatically flatten management.

— Seattle-based tech leader Philip Su has joined Anthropic as a member of technical staff on beneficial deployments. The management role focuses on AI applications in global health, life sciences, economic mobility and education.

Su started his tech career with 12 years at Microsoft and later worked for Facebook. He has launched multiple ventures, including Audere, a global health software nonprofit, and Superphonic, a podcast player. In 2021, he worked at an Amazon fulfillment center to experience the holiday rush.

Su also created and leads an annual course for University of Washington computer science students on how to maximize their personal and professional growth.

— More leadership changes are underway at SeekOut, a Bellevue-based recruiting startup launched in 2017. The company announced Monday that co-founder John Tippett is now president, moving from his role as chief client officer.

In April, SeekOut CEO and co-founder Anoop Gupta retired and passed the reins to enterprise software veteran Sean Thompson. In August, co-founder and chief technology officer Aravind Bala took over as CEO. Thompson is now listed as an adviser to the board.

Tippett will lead day-to-day operations and work with Bala “on the company’s direction,” according to a press release. SeekOut said it wants to integrate AI tools into customers’ operations to reduce recruiters’ workload.

SeekOut is No. 68 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

— Fred Hutch Cancer Center has appointed Michael (Mick) Merritt as vice president of strategy and partnerships, effective Dec. 7.

Merritt joins from Penn Medicine, where he was chief operating officer of Penn Signature Services. He has more than 25 years of experience in academic medicine, consulting, strategy, business development and operations.

— Industrial wastewater treatment startup Membrion has named Alexander Demihovsky as director of applications engineering. He joins the Seattle-based company from Xylem. His past employers include Evoqua Water Technologies and Bechtel National.

“Alex helps turn customer needs into viable project plans, mitigate execution risks and develop competitive proposals,” the company said.

Membrion is No. 160 on the GeekWire 200.

— Marine geothermal energy startup Endurance Energy has named Marty Calvert as the director of turbomachinery. Calvert joins the Seattle startup from Blue Origin. He was previously a turbomachinery engineer at NASA for more than 13 years.

Endurance completed its fifth deployment to the ocean floor last month, testing Adélie, a 100-kilowatt geothermal generator named for a penguin.

— Lattice Semiconductor, a Hillsboro, Ore.-based company, has added two directors to its board:

• Raejeanne Skillern, former VP and chief marketing officer of Amazon Web Services, who returns to Lattice after serving on the board from 2022 to 2024
• John McCool, senior vice president and special adviser to the CEO at Arista Networks

Xbox is creating a new team to experiment with technologies that are changing how games are made, ported and played — including some that run counter to how the game industry and its business have traditionally worked.

Microsoft Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced Xbox Labs on Tuesday in a memo to employees, describing it as “a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience.”

The group will be led by Scott Van Vliet, Xbox’s chief technology officer since May. Sharma said the team will build in the open and measure success “by whether more people are playing and creating.”

Sharma pointed to recent examples of games being decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never designed for, as well as Windows PC games translated to run on Apple Silicon or inside a web browser. She called these “unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models.”

The memo never uses the term AI (or SI), but it frames the effort in part around AI agents.

“Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software,” Sharma wrote. “Games share many of those same properties.” She said people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing Xbox games, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide.

Sharma came to Xbox in February from Microsoft’s CoreAI division. In her first memo as CEO, she said games would be “crafted by humans, and created with the most innovative technology provided by us,” and pledged not to “flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop.”

In May, she pulled Gaming Copilot from mobile and canceled its console launch, saying Xbox would “retire features that don’t align with where we’re headed.”

Microsoft last month cut 268 roles in Xbox Game Studios and moved work on the next Halo game to Activision. It was the latest round in a reset Sharma announced in July, which called for about 3,200 job cuts by the end of this fiscal year, roughly 20% of the Xbox workforce. The company said at the time that the restructuring was about 75% complete.

Xbox’s priorities aren’t changing, Sharma wrote in her new memo, describing Labs as “a way to explore new technology without abandoning the work already underway.”

Microsoft cut 277 jobs in the Seattle region as part of its latest round of layoffs, with artists, game designers and producers making up a large share of the affected roles, a new filing shows.

The filing was made public Thursday afternoon under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. Microsoft gave approximate numbers earlier this week when it announced the cuts, which included the latest stage in the company’s ongoing Xbox restructuring.

Art, game production, game design, technical art and audio design account for 77 of the 277 positions listed in the filing. Software engineering is the largest single category, totaling 60 roles.

Other positions are in functional areas including product marketing, technical writing, product management, data science, business management, finance and legal.

The filing says 252 of the positions impacted in the state are based at Microsoft’s Redmond campus, with 25 held by remote employees in the region, adding up to the 277 total. Microsoft had previously said about 300 of the cuts were in Washington state, out of fewer than 600 globally.

Out of that global total, 268 were in Xbox Game Studios, part of a restructuring designed to return the games division to growth and profitability. Halo Studios in Redmond faced a substantial reduction, and the company said work on the next Halo game is moving to its Activision subsidiary.

Microsoft cut 605 Washington jobs in July as part of 4,800 layoffs worldwide at the time. The company eliminated more than 15,000 positions globally across two rounds in 2025.

Microsoft is making hundreds of additional layoffs on Tuesday morning, continuing the Xbox restructuring announced in July but also extending beyond it with job cuts in areas including cloud, AI, marketing and research.

The company said the total reductions number fewer than 600 globally. About 300 of them are in Washington state, according to the company. It continues the steady trickle of job cuts by Microsoft and other tech companies in the Seattle region in recent months.

[Update: A filing made public Thursday put the official total in the state at 277 jobs.]

Worldwide, the company is cutting 268 roles in Xbox Game Studios, including Halo Studios, other first-party studios and the division’s management and operating teams.

It’s the continuation of a larger effort by Xbox CEO Asha Sharma to cut costs and consolidate game studios under fewer publishers in an effort to return to growth and profitability.

Microsoft said in July that Xbox would shed about 3,200 roles by the end of its fiscal year, roughly 20% of the division, in what Sharma called the biggest restructuring in Xbox history. The latest Xbox cuts are part of those previously announced numbers.

The company said Tuesday that the Xbox restructuring is now about 75% complete.

“The goal is to strengthen our franchises and games by operating fewer business units, aligning groups that already work closely together, and focusing our publishing expertise,” Matt Booty, Xbox chief content officer, wrote in a memo to employees Tuesday morning.

New Xbox restructuring details

Work on the next Halo game is moving to Activision, which Microsoft acquired in 2023 for $68.7 billion. The game will be led by a new team separate from the Call of Duty franchise.

A reduced team will stay at Halo Studios (formerly 343 Industries) in Redmond to support existing Halo games, the community and esports.

Rob Kostich, president of Activision, said in a statement that the company has “already begun assembling a purpose-built team, unique in capability and talent.” He said the goal is to “make the greatest Halo game ever, worthy of its universe and legacy, while staying true to what made players love it in the first place.”

Activision is also taking over World’s Edge, the Redmond studio behind Age of Empires, and assuming control of Rare, the English studio behind Sea of Thieves.

Ninja Theory is facing a possible shutdown. Microsoft said in July it had a deal to hand off the studio, which makes the Hellblade series. That agreement fell through, as did a second one. Microsoft is telling employees that the studio could close, but it still hopes to hand it off.

Obsidian Entertainment will become part of Bethesda. The California studio made Fallout: New Vegas for Bethesda in 2010 as an outside developer, and it’s working on another game set in the Fallout universe now. Obsidian’s Grounded survival franchise will move over as well.

Microsoft Casual Games is moving under King, the maker of Candy Crush. The Redmond team makes Microsoft Solitaire and other titles bundled with Windows.

Turn 10 Studios and Playground Games will merge into a single studio, making both the Forza racing games and the Fable series. Turn 10 is in Redmond and Playground is in England. The two have worked together on Forza for a decade.

Undead Labs has been spun off. Microsoft said the Seattle studio behind State of Decay transitioned on terms similar to Compulsion Games and Double Fine, which went independent in August, and that State of Decay 3 will launch on Game Pass on day one with a new publisher.

Arkane in France still has no announced outcome. It’s the last of five studios Microsoft moved to divest in July. Consultations there are expected to run through the end of the year.

Companywide job cuts

More details on Microsoft’s Washington state cuts, including the types of roles affected, will likely emerge later through a WARN notice filed with state employment officials.

The company described the reductions beyond Xbox as part of the normal course of business, as teams reevaluated their needs, with no single cause behind the layoffs. Microsoft and other big tech companies have been keeping a tight rein on operating expenses as they plow tens of billions of dollars into new AI and cloud infrastructure.

Microsoft eliminated 4,800 jobs globally in July, about 2% of its workforce, including 605 in Washington state. In 2025 it cut more than 15,000 across two rounds, about 6,000 in May and around 9,000 in July, including 830 in Washington.

The company also offered voluntary retirement for the first time this year. About 30% of roughly 8,750 eligible U.S. employees took the buyout, which reduced the size of the July layoffs.

At the same time, Microsoft continues to hire in other areas. The company said 850 university hires started in August and that it had 1,300 interns over the summer, many of whom it works to convert into full-time roles.

Microsoft’s latest cuts are part of a larger pattern across the industry and the region. Oracle eliminated 359 jobs in Washington last week, and Zillow cut more than 500 in August, its largest round of the year. Amazon, Starbucks, T-Mobile, Google, Salesforce, TikTok, Uber and Qualtrics have all made smaller cuts in the region since July.