— 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

— Kymeta has appointed former CIA Deputy Director Elizabeth Kimber as chief growth officer.

Kymeta, a Redmond, Wash.-based mobile satellite communications company, is working to increase sales with the Department of Defense, the intelligence community and other organizations in national security.

Kimber had a 37-year career with the CIA, departing in 2022 as the agency’s deputy director for operations. She most recently worked as a vice president with Two Six Technologies and has served on Kymeta’s board of directors for two years.

— Alaska Airlines has named Amaresh Siva as its first chief information technology officer. Siva joins from CVS Health and has held technology leadership roles for more than two decades at companies including Lowe’s, Target and GE Money.

“Technology touches nearly every part of how we run our airline and serve our guests, and Amaresh will bring our technology and digital teams together under one leader,” said Ben Minicucci, CEO of Alaska Air Group, in announcing the news.

— Vijaye Raji, founder and former CEO of Bellevue, Wash.-based Statsig and now OpenAI’s CTO of applications, has joined the board of Amplitude, a digital analytics and product intelligence company. OpenAI acquired Statsig last year, and Statsig and Amplitude announced a strategic partnership in May in which Amplitude would build on Statsig’s brand and customers.

“Statsig continues as a platform and brand within Amplitude,” Raji said. “Joining the board is an opportunity for me to help carry that mission forward as Amplitude and Statsig build their next chapter together.”

Here are four departures and arrivals for Microsoft leaders:

— Vasu Jakkal has left her role as Microsoft corporate vice president of security, compliance, identity, management and privacy after more than six years. She has joined Armadin, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based cybersecurity company, as chief strategy and business officer.

Jakkal is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and previously held executive roles at FireEye and Intel. She praised Armadin’s mission, which she described as building “autonomous security to stay ahead of attackers and build a safer world for all.”

— Microsoft VP Hans Yang is leaving. The Los Angeles-based leader, most recently focused on AI transformation, product strategy and growth, was formerly a general manager for Microsoft for Startups and Microsoft Learn.

“I think my next hill to climb is helping companies capture real ROI from AI,” Yang said, adding, “If you know a company that is struggling to get started with AI, or has invested but is not yet seeing meaningful value, I would welcome any introductions.”

— Venky Chandrasekharan is returning to Microsoft for the role of general manager of Windows commercial category and investments. He left the company in 2021 after 12 years and worked at Qualcomm and Acuity Brands in the interim.

“Having spent some of my most formative years at Microsoft, there’s definitely a sense of familiarity — but I’m coming back with new experiences, a broader perspective, and a lot of excitement for what’s ahead,” Chandrasekharan said.

— Meg O’Conor Bannecker has left Microsoft after two years leading communications for the company’s Washington state team. Past roles include communications leadership at NanoString Technologies, Bannecker Public Affairs and Pier 70 Ventures.

— Patrick Miller has been appointed as global division president of real estate company JLL’s technology sector. Miller joins from Snap, where he served as senior director of global workplace services. He previously oversaw real estate operations for Amazon’s Seattle-area headquarters for more than three years and has worked for Facebook and DTZ.

“I’ve spent my career on the client side … so I know exactly what it feels like to need a partner who shows up, tells you the truth, and solves real problems,” Miller said.

— DigniFi, a Bellevue, Wash.-based fintech company providing repair financing for autos, RVs, ATVs and other motorized vehicles, has named Jefim Piekarz as chief product officer. Piekarz joins from Arch, and his past employers include Skylab74, Welo, Octane and Etsy. Launched in 2012, DigniFi has facilitated more than $575 million in transactions for automotive merchants in the U.S.

— Seattle-based global logistics company Tideworks Technology has named two C-suite leaders:

• Mark Traynor, chief product and technology officer, joins from Lynxis. He is an entrepreneur who has worked in port, rail and terminal logistics for more than 20 years.
• Guenter Schmidmeir, chief revenue officer, joins from Avlino and has decades of maritime leadership from Germany.

— Adaptiva, a Kirkland, Wash.-based company automating software updates across computers, has named Allison Armstrong VP of product marketing. She joined from Elemica and has worked for Transmit Security, Hopin, Qualtrics, Apptio and others.

— Smarsh, a Portland, Ore.-based company providing communications data and insights, has appointed Alessandro Silva as its first chief growth officer. He joins from ACI Worldwide, and his past employers include Western Union and Carlyle Group. Silva is also a board member for Teach for America.

— Seattle-based Yoodli has named Mike Mather as chief learning advisor. The startup recently expanded from helping people practice speeches, sales pitches and job interviews to providing corporate training across wide-ranging skills. Mather is CLO for the accounting firm KPMG US and was previously a partner at EY, IBM and PwC.

“For most of my career, the hardest part of [learning and development] was the gap between training and the moment someone actually has to perform,” Mather said. “Yoodli closes that gap.”

— DigiStor, a company with offices in Austin, Texas, and Vancouver, Wash., that offers secure data storage products, has appointed Peter Bell to its board of directors. Bell co-founded StorageNetworks and serves as managing partner at Stowe Capital, among other roles.

— Seattle-area tech leader Jake Varghese has been promoted to chief product and technology officer for Dayforce, a Minneapolis company providing HR, payroll and related technology. He previously worked for companies including Microsoft, ServiceNow, Tanium and ConnectWise.

— The Association of Washington Business Institute has appointed Meagan Darrow as executive director. Darrow is also an adjunct professor at Evergreen State College and was most recently executive director of the American Diabetes Association. The AWB Institute is the nonprofit research and education affiliate of the association, a longtime organization advocating on behalf of its 8,000 members.

— Five Seattle-area physicians were appointed to the National Academy of Medicine:

• Dr. Susan Stern, professor emeritus and founding chair of UW Medicine’s Department of Emergency Medicine
• Dr. Elizabeth Swisher, professor in the Fred Hutch Clinical Research Division and UW Medicine’s Division of Gynecologic Oncology, as well as deputy director of the Fred Hutch/UW/Seattle Children’s Cancer Consortium
• Dr. Leslie Walker, chair and professor of UW Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics and chief academic officer at Seattle Children’s
• Dr. Dimitri Christakis, professor in UW Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics, pediatrician at Seattle Children’s and chief health officer with Special Olympics International
• Dr. Christopher Longhurst, CEO of Seattle Children’s and clinical professor with UW Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics

— Brinc Drones, the Seattle-based maker of 911 response drones, has named Joe Levy chief revenue officer. Levy joins from Peregrine, a public safety data platform, and early in his career was a drill sergeant and combat engineer for the U.S. Army Reserve.

Levy praised the Brinc team, saying, “They’re passionate about what they do with a vision that will change the public safety landscape. I’m grateful to join them and help scale what they’ve built.”

Brinc announced a $125 million funding round in July, bringing its total raised to more than $280 million. The startup is hiring for numerous roles and is No. 6 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

— Seattle-based Fred Hutch Cancer Center has appointed Jessie Minton vice president and chief digital and information officer, a new position that brings the roles together.

Former Chief Data Officer Jeff Leek stepped down and is now a professor in the Fred Hutch Public Health Sciences Division and CEO of Synthesize Bio, a startup he co-founded in 2023. Last month, Fred Hutch announced Shawn Stapleton as VP and chief AI and innovation officer, another new role.

Minton joins from Washington University in St. Louis where she has been vice chancellor for technology and chief information officer since 2022. She was previously VP and CIO at the University of Oregon.

Fred Hutch praised Minton’s track record “of modernizing complex technology organizations, strengthening cybersecurity, governing large-scale Epic environments and aligning technology strategy with clinical, research and academic priorities.” The new role is effective Dec. 7.

— Jason (JJ) James has been named chief information officer of Acumatica, the Bellevue, Wash.-based enterprise software giant that was acquired last year by Vista Equity Partners. James has more than 25 years in technology leadership and was previously CIO at companies including Aptos Retail, Net Health and Optima Healthcare Solutions.

“My focus is putting AI to work across Acumatica while keeping security at the core, so we can move fast without compromising the trust our expanding community of customers, partners and developers places in us,” James said in a statement.

— Seattle tech leader Andrew Bennett has joined San Francisco-based Motive as chief marketing officer. Bennett was with Smartsheet for a decade, leaving as CMO in 2024. He is also a limited partner with the investment firm Stage 2 Capital.

Motive provides software, hardware and AI-powered tools to help businesses manage physical fleets of vehicles and heavy equipment.

— Steven Chen has left LinkedIn, where he served as director and head of corporate legal and sustainability, to become a senior director at Rubrik.

— Seattle-based LevelTen Energy, a startup facilitating the deployment of clean energy projects, has appointed John Barrow as director of a new initiative enabling the purchase and sale of data center projects under development.

Barrow joins from CyrusOne, a global data center developer and operator, and was with CPS Energy for more than 15 years.

“In my career, I’ve had a front-row seat to the data center boom,” Barrow said. Participants are struggling to quickly secure locations and energy, he said, adding that LevelTen “can solve those problems for industry participants at scale.”

— Certivo, a Seattle startup building technology to automate supply chain compliance, has named Jeffrey Bornstein to its board. Bornstein was with GE for nearly three decades and served in roles including vice chairman and chief financial officer.

“He has run the numbers for some of the most complex industrial supply chains in the world while regulators checked every one of them,” said Certivo CEO Kunal Chopra. Certivo is No. 194 on the GeekWire 200.

— Convera, a Seattle-based fintech company helping businesses transfer money across borders, has added to its leadership team. All four will work out of Convera’s other offices.

• Mike Cahill has been appointed EVP and chief operating officer after joining in June as interim chief product and technology officer. Past employers include Early Warning Services, the company behind Zelle, as well as PayPal, Boku and American Express.
• Jon Southall has been named SVP and chief technology officer. He joins from PayPal and has also worked for Boku and Braintree.
• Tui Allen has joined as SVP and chief product officer. She previously worked for employers including Ticketmaster, Shopify and Blackbaud.
• Chris Steinig has been named CIO after leading Convera’s technology operations for four years.

— Portable Consultants a Redmond, Wash., enterprise telecommunications and data connectivity provider, has named two leaders.

• Carrie Ferrero has joined as VP of product and marketing development. She previously served as VP of sales engineering at Connectbase.
• Troy Brockway has been named director of client development, joining from SpikeUp Media.

— Reperio Health, a Portland, Ore., startup bringing preventive health check-ups into the home, has named Brad Nations to its board of directors. Nations is CEO and founder of JB Advisory.

— iQmetrix, a Vancouver, B.C.-based company building point-of-sale and retail management software for cell phone and wireless stores, has appointed Beniamin Longodor as VP of global growth. Longodor, who is based in Austria, was previously with NTS Retail.

— Ravi Vedula, a corporate vice president at Microsoft, is leaving the company after 26 years. Vedula, who is based in the Seattle area, led an organization of more than 1,000 people that runs the data and analytics platform behind Microsoft 365 and Copilot.

“26 years. It’s time,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “Goodbye and thank you, Microsoft. It’s been a privilege. I gave it my all.”

Vedula joined Microsoft in 2000 and was the first engineering manager for Exchange Online.

His memoir, “Hyderabad Days: The code we lived by before we coded,” was published in March by Microsoft’s 8080 Books. It recounts his childhood in a government housing colony in Hyderabad, India, with each chapter followed by a lesson about leadership, engineering or life, as GeekWire reported at the time.

“I leave with gratitude for the people and experiences that shaped those years,” Vedula told GeekWire.

He said he is leaving room for “another professional chapter if the right opportunity comes along,” but for now plans to focus on travel, ways to contribute and writing, including a possible book based on his experiences receiving a heart transplant in 2017.

— AI and robotics company Boston Dynamics announced Rohit Prasad as its new CEO, effective Oct. 7. Prasad, who is based in the Boston area, was Amazon’s senior vice president and head scientist for artificial general intelligence until he left the company at the end of 2025.

He takes over from interim CEO Amanda McMaster, the company’s chief financial officer, after Robert Playter retired in February following more than 30 years at Boston Dynamics. Hyundai Motor Group holds a controlling stake in the company.

Prasad joined Amazon in 2013, during the early days of Alexa, and oversaw the creation of its Nova AI models. Boston Dynamics makes the Spot and Stretch robots and is developing the Atlas humanoid. Prasad is also expected to join the company’s board, subject to approval.

“Boston Dynamics is uniquely positioned to advance Physical AI through its world-class robotics expertise,” Prasad said in the announcement.

— Qualtrics has appointed Mike Potter chief technology officer of the experience management company. He joins from Petal, an Ontario healthcare company, and has worked in leadership at Qlik, IBM and Cognos.

“I have spent the better part of my career building platforms at scale, the kind of work that requires deep technical conviction, strong collaboration, and a relentless focus on what customers actually need. That is what drew me to Qualtrics,” Potter said.

Qualtrics has dual headquarters in Seattle and Provo, Utah. It recently cut 117 jobs connected to its Seattle operations, largely affecting engineering and product teams. Last year, the company spent $6.75 billion to acquire Press Ganey Forsta.

— Shawn Stapleton has been named vice president and chief AI and innovation officer, a newly created role at Fred Hutch Cancer Center. He joins the Seattle nonprofit from MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he led AI lifecycle management for more than three years. Before that, he was the Seattle-based head of data science for Philips.

Stapleton helped scale MD Anderson’s AI initiatives across clinical, research and administrative settings, Fred Hutch said, adding, “His experience at the intersection of strategy, governance and implementation will be instrumental as we continue building the foundation for AI-enabled medicine and discovery.”

— Seattle-based defense tech startup Overland AI has named Jon Abramovic as vice president of international growth. Abramovic has held sales leadership roles in Taiwan, Prague and Beijing. He was most recently director of global defense sales at SIG Sauer and spent eight years at Oshkosh Defense leading business development across Europe and Asia.

“Having spent years operating overseas, I’ve seen firsthand what our allies face against near-peer adversaries and what it takes to stay ahead. Overland AI’s technology represents a generational leap in the ground domain,” Abramovic said.

Overland AI is No. 7 in the GeekWire 200, a ranking of the region’s top privately held tech startups.

— Noosphere Labs, a Seattle-area AI startup first covered by GeekWire in August, has announced its leadership team. The company, launched by former Meta AI research director Kevin Carlberg, is pursuing “human-centered physical intelligence” — AI designed to help people interact with and make sense of the physical world, beyond text and images on screens.

Its team includes:

• Tyler Simpson, co-founder and chief operating officer, who left Meta to start Noosphere Labs. He previously was co-founder and CTO of Luum by HealthEquity and spent more than 11 years at Microsoft.
• Andrew Ma, engineering leader, has more than 20 years’ experience across Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft, most recently leading Google Cloud’s Apache Spark teams.
• Joshua Walton, founding design partner, was a director at Meta Reality Labs Research and worked on Microsoft’s HoloLens.
• Louis Barinaga, founding hardware partner, spent the bulk of his career at HP and more recently held leadership roles at Meta’s augmented reality program, Valve and Microsoft.
• Andrew Smith, founding AI engineer, led Zillow’s first agentic AI system and previously worked for Amazon and Sandia National Laboratories.
• Michael Iuzzolino, founding AI engineer, joined from Meta, where he worked on large language models, and previously held roles at Google Brain and Microsoft Research.
• Mikhail Shashkov, founding architect, was at Amazon Lab126 for more than seven years and previously at Sandia.

— Liz Pearce has been named Earth Finance‘s first chief commercial officer. She joined from Ever.green, where she was chief revenue officer. Past roles include CEO of LiquidPlanner, co-founder and CEO of Fresh Chalk, and vice president of marketing for GoDaddy.

Earth Finance, a Seattle-based startup helping businesses reduce their climate impacts, recently launched a platform called SpatiaFi that enables customers to make location-based capital decisions.

“Earth Finance is already delivering game-changing results for customers,” Pearce said. “I can’t wait to get to work with this team to scale that impact.”

— Charlie Bell, the longtime Amazon Web Services executive who left to run security, compliance and identity at Microsoft, has been appointed to the board of directors at the cybersecurity firm Tenable. The appointment was disclosed in an SEC filing and framed as “reinforcement for Tenable’s AI-driven exposure management push.”

— Two notable Amazon moves:

• Fırat Güder, a professor and chief engineer of Güder Research Group at Imperial College London, has joined Amazon as a scholar in the tech giant’s special projects organization. “Here, we are building the next generation of cutting-edge technologies that define the future of humanity. It is an incredible honor to join a small, elite group of innovators and researchers pushing the boundaries of what is possible,” Güder said.
• Leonardo de Moura has been promoted to vice president and distinguished scientist with AWS in Seattle. He joined the company in 2023.

— Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) has named Amelia Marckworth director of programs, innovation and entrepreneurship. She joins from Seattle University, where she has held leadership roles for more than a decade and also served as an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship in the Albers School of Business and Economics.

“Amelia has a proven track record of launching and growing startup programs, coaching founders directly, and being part of WTIA as a committee member and mentor. We’re excited to bring that experience and talent onto our startups team,” Randa Minkarah, WTIA’s executive director and CEO, said in a statement.

— Hernan Alvarez has taken a role at Seattle-based Hyperparam to lead product and go-to-market at the startup, which is building tools for collecting, storing and analyzing the data that AI systems produce. The company recently launched a product called HypAware to improve oversight of AI agents and catch their errors.

Alvarez joins from Great Expectations, where he was CEO. He earlier worked with Hyperparam founder Kenny Daniel at Algorithmia, a machine learning company co-founded by Daniel and acquired by DataRobot.

— Philip Jensen has joined Zap Energy as vice president of fuel programs and operations. Zap, an Everett, Wash.-based fusion startup, announced in April that it was expanding its focus to include nuclear fission. Jensen was previously at First American Nuclear and spent more than seven years at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Zap said Jensen “brings deep expertise in nuclear fuel design, testing, and manufacturing, and a track record of launching new fuel programs and partnerships.”

— Christie Johansen-Pinney has joined Noble Studios as its Seattle-based vice president of client experience. She has held VP roles at firms including Rooster Punk, DEPT and The Marketing Practice.

— Anders Mortensen, formerly CRO at The Trade Desk, has been appointed to the advisory board of Scowtt, a Seattle startup helping advertisers optimize their ad spending. Mortensen spent more than 13 years at Google, leaving as vice president of U.S. mid-market sales lead generation.