Jared Palmer, Xbox's newly appointed vice president of engineering and technical advisor to CEO Asha Sharma, has departed the company after only two months in the role. Palmer has accepted a position as vice president of engineering at Cognition, an AI company.
Palmer announced his departure in an update to his LinkedIn profile, stating, "I’m grateful to Asha and everyone at Microsoft and Xbox for an amazing year. Excited for this next chapter." Cognition's website describes its product, Devin, as the "first autonomous software engineer" capable of planning, writing, testing, and shipping production code independently.
This move marks Palmer's return to the artificial intelligence sector. Before his brief tenure at Xbox, he served as vice president of product at Microsoft's CoreAI division, which was also led by Sharma. That role lasted eight months. Prior to that, Palmer spent approximately four years as vice president of AI at Vercel, an AI infrastructure company.
When Palmer was initially appointed to Xbox, Sharma indicated he would collaborate directly with her on "our most complex product and engineering problems, with a focus on developer tooling, taste, and infrastructure." While the exact reasons for his departure are not public, the short duration of his tenure in such a critical position presents optics challenges for the Xbox division. Microsoft has not publicly commented on Palmer's departure, and attempts to reach the company for comment were ongoing at the time of reporting.