— Jason Vogrinec joined Lyft as head of engineering, moving from Microsoft, where he was vice president of engineering for Microsoft Teams and led a 500-person group.
Prior to Microsoft, Vogrinec worked for 13 years at Amazon, most recently as engineering general manager for AWS Datacenter & Regional Networks. At Lyft, he will be based in Seattle.
— Greg Twinney is now CEO of General Fusion. He was previously as CFO for the Vancouver, B.C.-based clean energy company. Prior to joining General Fusion, Twinney was COO and CFO of social media management company Hootsuite, and an executive VP at real estate technology platform Real Matters.
Twinney replaces Christofer Mowry, who resigned after more than five years as CEO and led the company through development and siting of a fusion energy plant. General Fusion raised $130 million last November, bringing its total funding to about $300 million.
Other personnel changes across the Pacific Northwest tech industry:
- Vivian Qu joined Tidal Vision, which upcycles discarded crab shells, as part of its acquisition of nanomaterial startup ViaeX. Qu was previously CEO and founder of ViaeX and is now Tidal Vision’s chief product officer.
- Ghazi Masood is now chief revenue officer of Esper, which operates a DevOps platform for companies managing fleets of Android devices. Masood moved from authentication platform company Auth0, and is also is a volunteer pilot for Angel Flight West, which helps people with medical conditions. Esper recently laid off 12% of its staff, less than a year after raising $60 million.
- Allie K. Miller left her position at Amazon Web Services as global head of machine learning business development, startups and venture capital. “I’m excited to jump back into entrepreneurship,” she said in a LinkedIn post.
