— Microsoft’s head of developer relations Ashley Willis McNamara announced Friday that she is departing and joining Google as head of developer communities.
Willis spent more than five years at Microsoft, working with third-party developers and people building open source software. She previously worked at Pivotal and Rackspace.
“Leaving such a great team was a difficult decision, but it’s time for me to move onto something else and make space for new leaders,” Willis wrote on Twitter.
Willis will work out of Google’s Seattle office. Google currently has more than 7,200 employees in Washington state, most of which are based at growing engineering centers in Seattle and Kirkland.
Google has various developer community programs and there are more than 100 Google Developer Communities across the globe with local chapters that host public meetups.
— Christina Seafort, a former HR leader at Amazon, joined AppLovin as chief people officer.
Seafort has more than 25 years of HR leadership experience. She joined Amazon in 2017 and was most recently head of HR for Global Mergers & Acquisitions. Seafort previously worked at Monster Energy and Sony Pictures Entertainment.
AppLovin is a Palo Alto, Calif.-based company that sells software solutions for mobile apps. The company went public last year and reported $793 million in revenue for the fourth quarter, up 56%.
— Jim Allchin, the former Microsoft Windows chief, has become a technical advisor to Kirkland-based AI document engineering company Docugami, where two other former Microsoft executives are key figures.
Docugami is led by co-founder and CEO Jean Paoli, a co-creator of the industry-wide XML 1.0 standard, Microsoft InfoPath and modern Microsoft Office file formats.
Bob Muglia, the former Snowflake CEO and longtime Microsoft Windows Server exec, is a Docugami investor and board member.
The startup’s technology uses artificial intelligence to help users create documents, such as contracts and reports, that can then be analyzed at large scale, as if in a structured database.
In a Q&A on the company’s site, Allchin says Docugami’s platform approach and “enormous potential impact” motivated him to become a technical advisor to the company.
“I’ve been doing a lot of music and I’m still doing code, but I have not gotten involved with any companies or advising until now because I wanted to have freedom for my kids and family,” Allchin says, explaining that his youngest just went off to college.
Other personnel changes across the Pacific Northwest tech industry:
- Michael Wilkens has decided not to seek re-election to the board of T-Mobile US, in connection with his announced departure as an executive with Deutsche Telekom AG, according to an SEC filing by the Bellevue-based wireless carrier.
- John Flemming, a longtime Seattle-based Wells Fargo exec working in the tech sector, joined CIBC Innovation Banking as managing director and will lead a new Seattle office.
- John Pincott, former managing director at Turning Technologies, joined Act-On as head of EMEA sales.
- Casey Munck, former senior director of marketing at Revinate, joined Act-On as vice president of marketing.
