When Microsoft assigned Asha Sharma as the new leader of the Xbox division in February, replacing the Phil Spencer regime, the executive brought along some of her former colleagues with her. Now, one of those recent hires is leaving.
Jared Palmer, who previously held the title of Xbox VP of engineering, announced on X that he’s joined Cognition, an AI company. “Personal update: I’ve joined Cognition to lead engineering,” he wrote. “I’m grateful to Asha Sharma and everyone at Xbox for an amazing year.”
Palmer was among several of Sharma’s former colleagues at Microsoft’s CoreAI team, which the executive brought to the Xbox team in May. At the time, she said Palmer will work on developer tools, engineering, product and infrastructure.
“He’s spent his career building developer tools that remove friction and increase productivity,” Sharma said of Palmer at the time. “That’s exactly the mindset we want, using technology to support creators.”
Palmer’s stint at Microsoft as a whole has been brief, having joined CoreAI in October last year, before moving to the Xbox team seven months later. It’s not clear what prompted the VP to leave after such a short period at Xbox, but the reason could have more to do with where he’s going rather than anything to do with Microsoft.
Palmer leaves Xbox at the most tumultuous time in its history. As part of Asha Sharma’s big reset plan, the executive laid off 1,600 people across almost all of the studios it owns, with further 1,600 to be laid off over the course of fiscal year 2027, for a total of 3,200. As part of the same campaign, Microsoft is divesting itself from four studios it previously owned, and is proposing the closure of another.
It’s not clear what effect this is going to have on the future of the platform, particularly when it comes to Xbox’s next-gen console Project Helix, as the year or so preceding a new console launch is typically when most of that platform work is concentrated.
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