— Shopify hired one of Microsoft’s top engineering leaders as its new chief technology officer.
The Toronto-based e-commerce giant called Mikhail Parakhin“one of the finest machine learning crafters on the planet” in its announcement Wednesday.
Parakhin spent the past five years at Microsoft leading artificial intelligence efforts and teams working on Bing, Edge browsers, advertising, web services, and more.
His first stint at Microsoft was from 2007 to 2014. Parakhin then spent five years at Russian tech giant Yandex, where he was CTO.
Parakhin left Microsoft earlier this year following the company’s hiring of AI pioneer Mustafa Suleyman and colleagues from Inflection AI. Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, is leading a new organization called Microsoft AI.
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott joined the Shopify board last month. The company has been rolling out its own AI tools and is also using AI to improve internal efficiency.
— Matt Hulett, a veteran of the Seattle tech and startup scene, joined online education company StraighterLine as its new CEO.
Hulett is no stranger to education technology as the former president of language learning giant Rosetta Stone.
More recently, Hulett was CEO and president of PetMed Express, a publicly traded, Florida-based online pet pharmacy. He stepped down from PetMed in April.
Hulett also held leadership roles at various Seattle tech companies, including TINYpulse, ClickBank, RealNetworks, Expedia, and AdXpose.
Washington D.C.-based StraighterLine launched in 2008 and offers postsecondary education courses online. The company raised a “significant investment” from private equity firm BV Investment Partners in 2020. More than 350,000 students have taken classes with StraighterLine and transferred credit to more than 3,000 accredited U.S. colleges and universities.
