— Baskar Sridharan, a longtime Seattle-area software engineering leader who was most recently a vice president at Google, joined Amazon Web Services as a vice president leading the AI/ML Services and Infrastructure team.
Sridharan spent more than five years at Google, where he managed various Google Cloud engineering teams. He previously was at Microsoft for nearly 16 years.
In a post on LinkedIn, Sridharan called AWS “the best place in the world to build AI applications.”
AWS announced Tuesday that AWS CEO Adam Selipsky was stepping down and will be replaced by longtime exec Matt Garman.
— Marc Whitten, chief product and technology officer at gaming giant Unity Software, is resigning effective June 1, according to a new SEC filing. Whitten joined Unity in 2021 after more than four years leading Amazon’s entertainment devices division. He was previously chief product officer at speaker company Sonos, and spent 17 years at Microsoft.
— PitchBook CEO and founder John Gabbert is departing, 17 years after he helped launch the Seattle-based financial data company that was acquired by Morningstar in 2016. “We’ve created a globally successful company, served 100,000s of customers, created nearly 4,000 jobs, thousands of friendships, a good number of marriages and a resulting bunch of kids,” Gabbert wrote on LinkedIn. “Overall, a beautiful thing and I couldn’t be prouder.”
— Amazon moved its Sustainability organization, led by Chief Sustainability Officer Kara Hurst, to the Global Communications & Community Impact organization, which is overseen by Drew Herdener, senior vice president.
“We’ve seen that tightly partnering with teams across Amazon is a key ingredient for success in sustainability, and that was one of the most important considerations as I thought about where this team should sit,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in an email to employees on Tuesday, shared with GeekWire by the company. “Drew has 20+ years of experience successfully leading horizontal functions at Amazon where partnering with a myriad of senior leaders and teams across the company is critical. Drew will be a strong partner for Kara and our Sustainability team going forward.”
Hurst joined Amazon in 2014. She previously was CEO at The Sustainability Consortium and was an exec at BSR for nearly 12 years.
— Remitly co-founder Josh Hug is transitioning from his current role as chief operating officer to a new role as vice chair, according to a SEC filing. He will remain on the board of the digital remittance company he helped start in 2011.
— Brittany Jarnot, public policy manager with the Washington Technology Industry Association, is stepping down to take a government affairs role at Salesforce. Jarnot joined WTIA in 2021 and previously worked for the U.S. House of Representatives.
— Kenny Daniel, who co-founded Seattle-based machine learning startup Algorithmia, joined Madrona as an entrepreneur-in-residence. Daniel was most recently a CTO at DataRobot, which acquired Algorithmia in 2021.
— Ron Miller stepped down from his senior engineering position at Starbucks. Miller previously worked for Nordstrom and founded a startup called URGravity.
