Xbox's new VP of engineering quits just 2 months after taking the job

Just two months after he was appointed the new vice president of engineering at Xbox and technical advisor to CEO Asha Sharma, Jared Palmer is now the former vice president of engineering at Xbox and technical advisor to CEO Asha Sharma. In an update to his LinkedIn profile, Palmer said he's joined AI company Cognition to serve as its vice president of engineering instead.

"I’m grateful to Asha and everyone at Microsoft and Xbox for an amazing year," Palmer wrote in a very to-the-point missive. "Excited for this next chapter."

"Cognition operates Devin, the first autonomous software engineer," the company's website says, in case you were wondering what it actually does. "Devin plans, writes, tests, and ships production code on its own, working inside your codebase and the tools your team already uses."

AI is definitely Palmer's thing: Prior to his brief tenure at Xbox, he was vice president of product at Microsoft's CoreAI division, which Sharma headed up before taking the reins at Xbox. That was a fairly short spin too, lasting just eight months; before that he spent roughly four years as the vice president of AI at AI infrastructure company Vercel.

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Sharma said when Palmer was appointed that he would work directly with her "on our most complex product and engineering problems, with a focus on developer tooling, taste, and infrastructure."

That's a pretty big mandate, and I have to assume that at least some of those complex problems remain unsolved. You never want to read too much into these things, and the great likelihood is that Cognition is more up his alley than a struggling videogame platform, and also that it offered him tons of money. But even so, the optics of losing a guy who was hand-picked for such a vital role just two months into the job aren't great.

Thus far, Sharma hasn't publicly acknowledged Palmer's departure. I've reached out to Microsoft for comment and will update if anyone gets back to me to wish him well, or otherwise.