— Aneesh Raman has taken the role of chief economic opportunity officer at Microsoft. He previously held the same title at LinkedIn, a Microsoft subsidiary where he worked for five years.

The job is focused on “helping companies, including our own, build and deploy AI tools in ways that will unlock new levels of economic opportunity and human capability for workers and workforces alike,” Raman said.

Raman, who is based in San Francisco, began his career as a TV journalist and served as a speechwriter for President Obama and other political leaders. More recently he was an adviser to Gov. Gavin Newsom and led economic impact for Facebook.

— Jenny Lay-Flurrie was promoted to corporate vice president of Microsoft‘s Trusted Technology Group. In February, she had taken the role of vice president and head of Trusted Technology, which focuses on privacy, safety, regulatory compliance, responsible AI use and related topics.

Lay-Flurrie announced the change on LinkedIn, saying that she was “honoured, humbled and a little lost for words (yes,, it does occasionally happen ;)).”

The tech leader has been with Microsoft since 2005, and led the company’s efforts on accessibility and disability inclusion for more than a decade.

— Brian Gill has resigned as chief product and technology officer for DAT Freight & Analytics, a Beaverton, Ore.-based freight company. Gill was with DAT for more than three years and previously served as CPO for Nordstrom.

In a LinkedIn post, Gill did not give specifics on his next move but said he would be “rolling up my sleeves and building the many ideas that are suddenly so much easier to bring to life.”

Gill’s other past roles include executive positions at Hotwire and nearly a decade at Expedia. Last month DAT announced multiple promotions and hires to its leadership team.

— Colin Newman has joined Zillow Group as head of public policy. He was previously director of U.S. public policy for Amazon, leading initiatives on employment, workforce transformation, AI, transportation and economic development. He first took a government affairs role with Amazon’s Audible business in 2015 and moved to Amazon five years ago.

“I look forward to leveraging my government, legal, and public policy experience to support our efforts to simplify and democratize the housing process for everyone,” Newman said. His background includes legal counsel for former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

— Lisa Finnegan is returning to Microsoft as vice president and human resources business partner for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. Finnegan, who is based in Dublin, was previously with LinkedIn for more than eight years, departing in March 2025. Her interim role was with Lumera HR Consulting.

“It’s a pretty incredible time to (re)join Microsoft and the opportunity to help shape the people and organisation agenda across EMEA at this critical moment is incredibly compelling,” she said.

— James Lau, chief product officer at Hiya, announced this is his last week at the Seattle startup, which battles fraudulent calls and provides technology to protect voice identity. He’s been in the role for three years and previously worked at Microsoft over multiple stints.

Lau is launching a company called Entrovox, which he describes as an AI phone team that helps insurance agencies land new customers through state-of-the-art AI voice agents, branded caller ID and smart campaigns.

“There has never been a more exciting time for building, and I am deeply passionate about voice AI. Making AI sound genuinely human is a challenge I find irresistible,” Lau said.

— Jason Wilbur has left Oracle to join OpenAI‘s Seattle office as a leader in cloud partnerships.

Wilbur was with Oracle over two stints spanning more than six years and leaves the role of senior director of product management. Past jobs include CEO at Aarno Labs, co-founder of Require Security, and senior product manager at Amazon.

— Julia Liuson was appointed to Elastic’s board of directors. Earlier this year, Liuson resigned from Microsoft after more than 34 years. She was most recently president of Microsoft’s Developer Division. San Francisco’s Elastic bills itself as the “search AI company.”

— Dan Walter was promoted to vice president of fission technology for Everett, Wash.-based Zap Energy. Walter joined Zap earlier this year as the clean power startup announced it was expanding to pursue fission micro-reactors as well as fusion-based nuclear energy. Zap is No. 11 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

Walter was previously at TerraPower for nearly a decade, most recently in a director role for the nuclear power company.

— Kelsey Wolf has joined next-gen battery company Group14 Technologies as director of communications and marketing. Wolf was previously the communications lead for Rad Power Bikes, the Seattle-based e-bike startup that went bankrupt and was acquired this past spring. Group14 is No. 34 on the GeekWire 200.

“I’ve spent my career telling exciting stories about technology that changes how we work, how we find home, and how we move around the world. Up next, I will get to tell stories about the technology and materials powering our world,” she said.

— Tin Can, a Seattle startup selling Wi-Fi-enabled landline phones for kids, announced three hires:

• Evan Jacobs has joined as head of engineering, previously serving as a software development manager at Amazon Web Services. Jacobs is also a startup founder.
• Quinn Hawkins was named head of communities, joining from First Street, where he was chief product officer. His background includes leadership at Redfin and Microsoft.
• Masud Khan was named staff software engineer. Past employers include Apple, Databricks, Meta and Amazon.

Tin Can, which launched last year, is No. 153 on the GeekWire 200.

— EchoMark, ​the ​Bellevue, Wash., startup using forensic ​watermarking ​to identify ​the ​source of information leaks, ​has named Alex Gamoran vice president of enterprise sales. Gamoran was previously at Smartsheet for nearly a decade, leaving as regional vice president of commercial sales for North America.

“It struck me that every security-conscious enterprise is going to need a solution to the types of information leaks that conventional security software is blind to — and that’s when I knew I wanted to be part of EchoMark,” Gamoran said via email.

— Sara Dutta was named director of AI innovation and partnerships for Seattle biopharmaceutical company Omeros. She previously founded the life sciences consultancy Ocilisni and was a director at Novo Nordisk, focused on external partnerships and emerging technologies.

Last year, Omeros struck a deal worth up to $2.1 billion with Novo Nordisk, giving the latter exclusive global rights to develop and commercialize a clinical-stage drug candidate that treats rare blood and kidney disorders. Omeros won Deal of the Year at this year’s GeekWire Awards.

— Rebekah Bastian announced that she is leaving mpathic as chief marketing officer. She joined the Bellevue, Wash., startup working to make AI safe in December. Bastian previously launched and was CEO of the life-and-career social platform OwnTrail. She was with Zillow Group for more than 14 years and also worked at GlowForge.

“I’m giving myself some intentional time to explore ideas and let them incubate before deciding where they lead,” she said. That could include new companies or initiatives within existing companies, and her areas of focus span “human agency, creative entrepreneurship, economic opportunity, and generally how humans find meaning and thrive in the age of AI.”

— Seattle-area wine recommendation startup Theodora has appointed Heather Stephens founding marketing lead. Stephens has worked for more than a decade in consumer and B2B marketing, demand generation, and go-to-market strategy development.

— Marc Brown, former global head of M&A and strategic investments at Microsoft and now managing director of venture capital coverage at JPMorgan, has joined the board of trustees of the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, an organization supporting civic engagement for young people.

— Adrienne Lopez, a Seattle-based marketing leader who has worked on initiatives with organizations including Meta, WhatsApp, the Gates Foundation and Microsoft, was named executive vice president of WH Inc.

— Washington Research Foundation announced its new cohort of venture analysts: Jessica Ayers, Ankit Azad, Nello Gu, Michael Malone and Elya Shamskhou. The program helps graduate students and postdoctoral fellows gain expertise in technology commercialization and entrepreneurship.

Zillow Group’s revenue rose 18% to $772 million in the second quarter, beating its own forecast, but a $36 million restructuring charge from severance and other costs stemming from this week’s layoffs pushed it to a $4 million net loss.

The Seattle-based online real estate company, which on Tuesday laid off more than 500 people, or 7% of its workforce, expects the restructuring to cost $59 million to $64 million in total, with the rest recorded in the third quarter, according to the company’s 10-Q regulatory filing.

Zillow also announced a series of executive changes, including expanding CFO Jeremy Hofmann‘s role to include chief operating officer. Jun Choo, who became COO in 2024, is stepping down to focus on his health, serving as an advisor through the end of the year.

The company created a chief legal and policy officer role and hired Cassandra “Sandi” Knight, a Google vice president of litigation and discovery, who was previously PayPal chief litigation counsel. Knight starts next week.

Zillow and Redfin are set to go to trial Aug. 24 as defendants in an antitrust case brought by the FTC and five state attorneys general over the $100 million rental listings deal between the two companies. Zillow has spent $26 million on the case so far this year, including $10 million in the second quarter.

In addition, Zillow promoted Kathleen Berroth to senior vice president of strategy and operations, and Eric Wilson to senior vice president and GM of mortgages.

For the second quarter, Zillow said the residential real estate industry grew 6%, while industry-wide lending for home purchases was roughly flat compared with a year ago. The number of people visiting real estate sites and apps declined overall as mortgage rates rose, the company said, citing Comscore. Zillow’s own traffic fell 2%, to an average of 239 million monthly users.

Most of the revenue growth came from Zillow’s newer businesses. Mortgage revenue rose 75% to $84 million as Zillow directed buyers on its site to its own lending arm, and rentals revenue rose 31% to $209 million. Residential revenue, from advertising sold to real estate agents, grew 7% to $465 million.

Zillow Group’s layoffs will eliminate 91 jobs in Washington state, landing heavily on senior staff, according to a notice the company filed with the state Employment Security Department.

The filing under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act is the first detailed accounting of who was affected by the more than 500 layoffs the company announced Tuesday. The cuts hit about 7% of its global workforce, which stood at 7,058 as of March 31.

Zillow Group is officially headquartered in Seattle, but the relatively small share of the layoffs in its home state (18%) reflects how distributed it has become. The company adopted a remote-first model it calls “Cloud HQ” in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and it has continued to bet on remote work as other tech companies pulled employees back to the office.

The list of affected job titles in Washington state is dominated by senior positions. It includes five directors and three senior directors, 14 principal-level roles, and a long list of senior managers and senior individual contributors. Relatively few junior positions appear on the list.

Product and engineering absorbed the most. Senior Product Manager is the single largest line at seven positions, followed by Senior Software Development Engineer, Software Development Engineer and Senior UX Researcher at four each. Together, product and engineering roles account for more than a third of the Washington cuts.

The list also includes AI and machine learning positions: a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, a Senior Manager of Machine Learning Engineering, a Senior Applied Scientist, a Senior Manager of Research Science, and an Annotation Lead, associated with labeling data to train AI models.

Zillow told GeekWire on Tuesday that AI did not drive the layoffs. “Today’s changes are about better positioning Zillow for the path ahead, which includes having the right people in the right roles and being able to move faster,” a company spokesperson said.

The WARN notice adds a detail Zillow did not mention publicly: “Some of these terminations are the result of, or are expected to result in, the relocation or contracting out of operations and/or employee positions.”

Affected employees were notified Aug. 4 and will be terminated effective Oct. 5, more than 60 days later as required under state and federal law. They will continue to receive pay and benefits until then, according to the filing. Employees who are offered and accept another role at the company before that date will not be terminated.

The cuts affect workers at Zillow Group’s headquarters at 1301 Second Ave. in downtown Seattle and employees working from home elsewhere in Washington. The company said in the filing that its headquarters will remain open. None of the affected employees are represented by a union.

Zillow Group reports second-quarter earnings Wednesday afternoon.

Seattle-based online real estate company Zillow Group laid off more than 500 employees Tuesday, about 7% of its global workforce, its second and largest round of cuts this year.

The layoffs are about “ensuring we have a disciplined cost structure and getting more efficient, with the right people in the right positions,” Zillow Group CEO Jeremy Wacksman said in a company blog post announcing the cuts. He said the decision reflects “both the strides we’re making in our strategy and the reality of what is required of us to grow at scale.”

He added, “Continuing to grow at scale requires us to work differently than we do today.”

Wacksman told real estate executives at the T3 Leadership Summit in April that Zillow employees were being retrained to use AI in their jobs, with gains that “are small, but they’re compounding,” as reported by Real Estate News.

FOLLOW-UP: Zillow layoffs hit 91 jobs in Washington state, with senior roles bearing the brunt

Zillow told GeekWire the cuts were not driven by AI. “Today’s changes are about better positioning Zillow for the path ahead, which includes having the right people in the right roles and being able to move faster,” a company spokesperson said.

The company didn’t disclose which teams were affected, how many of the cuts will hit its Seattle headquarters, or what severance employees will receive.

Zillow Group will report second-quarter earnings Wednesday afternoon. The company’s business has been growing, defying a sluggish housing market. Its first-quarter revenue rose 18% year-over-year to $708 million, while the residential real estate industry grew 2%, according to NAR. Net income climbed to $46 million from $8 million a year earlier.

Wacksman indicated Tuesday that the company is still bucking the trend: “We continue to outperform the category, despite a housing market that has been essentially flat,” he wrote.

However, the company has been spending nearly as fast as it has been growing, on rental listings, loan officers for Zillow Home Loans, advertising and legal bills. Execs told investors in May that the spending would ease up in the second half of the year. Cutting payroll is one way to make that happen, and Zillow’s earnings guidance tomorrow could reflect that.

As for those legal bills: Zillow is headed to trial later this month in an FTC antitrust case over the $100 million deal the company struck in early 2025 to become the exclusive provider of multifamily rental listings on Redfin’s websites.

Zillow cut about 200 jobs in January, but characterized those as performance-related and part of its annual review cycle. It had 7,058 employees as of March 31, down just 10 positions from the end of 2025, meaning it had largely backfilled January’s cuts before Tuesday.

It’s part of a wave of cuts and consolidation in real estate portals and property tech. CoStar has cut its Homes.com inside-sales team by nearly 40% in recent months. Better founder Vishal Garg stepped down as CEO Monday as the mortgage company pushed to cut costs.

Rocket Companies acquired Seattle-based Redfin for $1.75 billion in an all-stock deal that closed in July 2025, then cut about 2% of its combined workforce weeks later. Longtime Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman departed in January after 20 years leading the company.

Along with its flagship Zillow portal, Zillow Group’s brands include Trulia, StreetEasy, HotPads and Out East, plus agent software products Follow Up Boss, ShowingTime and dotloop.

Updated after publication with additional details from Zillow.