Jason Taylor, the former vice president of infrastructure at Meta, joined Microsoft as corporate vice president and deputy CTO for the company’s AI supercomputing efforts.
Taylor spent more than 13 years at Meta, where he led various infrastructure projects. Previously he was CTO at ink2 and founded a gift certificate company called Lucidity in 1999. Taylor was the chair of the Open Compute Project Foundation, which promotes best practices for data center IT infrastructure, from 2015 to 2017.
In a post on LinkedIn, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott wrote that Taylor has “spent the better part of his career taking on impossible computing challenges.”
“I’m thrilled that he’s chosen to join Microsoft and work alongside Scott Guthrie, Rani Borkar, Noelle Walsh, Girish Bablani and our partners at OpenAI to build the next set of systems that will push the frontier of AI forward for us all,” Scott wrote.
— In other Microsoft exec hiring news, the tech giant recently brought on John Aisien to lead its Unified Security Intelligence business. Aisien was most recently CEO of Blue Cedar, a mobile app security company. He also held exec roles at Mocana and Oracle.
— Former longtime Amazon exec Jeff Blackburn joined the board of DoorDash. Blackburn, who retired from Amazon in 2022, joined the board of Roku last year.
— Eric Benson, a former exec at AWS and VMware, joined data startup Matillion as chief revenue officer. He most recently led cloud sales for the Americas at VMware. Benson splits his time between Bellevue, Wash., and Bend, Ore.
— Seattle startup Esper, which helps companies manage fleets of devices, hired Sam Lee as head of legal. Lee previously was director of legal at Seattle startup Outreach, and also spent time at J.P. Morgan and Kriss & Feuerstein.
