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Umesh Shankar. (LinkedIn Photo)
After nearly 19 years at Google, Umesh Shankar has joined Microsoft AI as a corporate vice president of engineering.
Shankar, based in New York City, has focused his career on privacy and security. His last role at Google was chief technologist and distinguished engineer for Google Cloud Security.
Shankar will lead a new privacy and security engineering effort focused on Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant, according to Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman.
“I believe that investing in a secure technical foundation will actually allow us to innovate with AI faster than we could in a world where giving AI more data and tools comes with unknown or unbounded risk,” he said on LinkedIn. “That’s why I’ll be focusing on building systems and platforms that have strong protections and user control built in.”
Shankar is the latest Google leader to join Microsoft AI in recent months. The unit has poached several execs from Google DeepMind, which was originally co-founded as a startup research lab by Suleyman.
Josh Hug. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Remitly co-founder Josh Hug is leaving his role as vice chair of the company’s board of directors, and will become a board member, according to a SEC filing.
Hug has served as chief product officer and chief operator of the Seattle-based remittance company. Prior to Remitly, Hug co-founded Shelfari, a social platform for book lovers, that he led until 2008 when it was acquired by Amazon. Hug remained at Amazon for three years, leaving to help launch Remitly. Earlier in his career Hug worked at RealNetworks.
Hug is now based in Miami, according to his LinkedIn profile.
— Kate Cohen joined Boise-based recruiting software company Crelate as vice president of marketing. Cohen previously held marketing leadership roles at Voltron Data, Randstad USA, and Aptum.
Dina Bass. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Dina Bass, a reporter covering Microsoft news for Bloomberg for more than two decades, has switched beats. Bass is now reporting on a newly created focus dubbed AI infrastructure.
“I’m looking forward to tackling the rapidly growing AI infrastructure area in all its aspects, opportunities and challenges — chips, servers, networking, energy, water, land, financing and more — looking at startups, established companies and the public sector,” Bass shared on LinkedIn.
Brody Ford will be joining the Microsoft beat at Bloomberg, teaming up with Matt Day.
Adam Loving. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Pioneer Square Labs’ Adam Loving has joined Meta’s Bellevue, Wash., office as a partner engineer on Llama Enterprise.
Loving was principal software engineer and engineering manager for Seattle’s PSL for more than nine years, working with nearly three dozen startups. His roles at the startup incubator included creating Picco, an LLM-powered code generation agent, and serving as interim CTO for new companies.
Peggy Sloan. (Seattle Aquarium Photo)
— Seattle Aquarium announced Peggy Sloan as its new president and CEO. In May Sloan will take over from Bob Davidson, who is retiring after more than 22 years at the aquarium. The organization is a world leader in marine conservation and restoration. In August it celebrated the opening of its immersive Ocean Pavilion expansion.
Sloan is an expert in marine biology and comes to the role from the John G. Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, one of the nation’s first and largest aquariums. She was previously at the North Caroline Aquarium at Fort Fisher.
The role marks Sloan’s return to the Pacific Northwest. Early in her career, she was a Seattle-based NOAA fisheries observer, deployed on catchers and trawlers in the Bering Sea.
— Longtime Seattle engineer Werner Koepf is now chief product and technology officer for the multilingual translation platform Lilt. Koepf comes to the role from Karat, where he was senior vice president of engineering for more than four years. His career includes leadership roles at Seattle companies Expedia, Amazon, Conversica, Ticketmaster and Wetpaint.
— Katharine Reinhold is the executive direct of Built Oregon, an organization supporting the state’s consumer product companies and ecosystem. Reinhold was previously a mentor and board member with the group, and currently serves as chief product officer for Pod, a leadership and business consulting company. Reinhold was previously director of innovation at Adidas, where she worked for more than 13 years.
— Fred Hutch Cancer Center announced the winner of the international Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award. The 2025 winner is Jeremy Hollis, a research assistant in the Basic Sciences Division at Seattle’s Fred Hutch. His work is focused on a protein component that is implicated in multiple diseases.
— Herman Radtke is chief technologist at Trove, a California “recommerce” company. Radtke comes to the role from Narvar and formerly held senior engineering roles at Nordstrom Rack.
