— After more than 26 years with Microsoft, Nadim Abdo is now the tech giant’s corporate vice president of Identity & Network Access (IDNA). The team’s services authenticate more than 1 billion users daily, and its Microsoft Entra technology is used by more than 95% of Fortune 500 companies, Abdo noted on LinkedIn.
“As the next wave of AI reshapes how people, apps, and autonomous systems interact, our opportunity is to redefine how trust is established, making secure access more intelligent, adaptive, and resilient by design,” Abdo added.
Abdo previously served as corporate VP of engineering for the company’s identity technologies for four years. He steps into the role as Joy Chik, Microsoft’s president of IDNA, announced her retirement in July.
— Longtime Seattle-area product lead Russell Dicker is now chief product officer for Zoom.
“I love building products that customers love,” he said on LinkedIn. “Zoom has an incredible foundation of innovation and a deep commitment to empowering how people work together.”
Dicker joins the company from Microsoft, where for the last four years he was corporate VP of product management for Teams and the Overture Maps Foundation, a Linux Foundation-hosted project to create a common mapping base layer. Dicker has also held roles at Google and Uber. He spent more than 15 years at Amazon in positions focused on Cloud Drive, personalization and automation, before leaving in 2014.
— Ankur Mehrotra left Amazon after nearly 18 years to join Google Cloud in Seattle as VP and general manager. Mehrotra said on LinkedIn that he’ll be helping Google customers manage AI workloads in a variety of secure and flexible cloud setups, and looks forward to working with a “stellar team.”
Mehrotra joined AWS as a software engineer in the Bengaluru Urban district in Karnataka, India, and relocated to the Seattle area in 2012.
“Reflecting on my tenure, I feel immensely fortunate to have grown alongside the company,” he said. “Over the years, I had the opportunity to work across a broad spectrum of the business — from the consumer and retail side to enterprise products and services.”
— Christian Taubman has resigned as chief growth officer of Redfin and Rocket, saying on LinkedIn that it had been “the honor of a lifetime” to help people realize the dream of homeownership. Rocket acquired Seattle real estate tech company Redfin last year.
“We got so many things done for consumers, but what I’ll remember most is the conversations and the people,” Taubman wrote. “I’m profoundly grateful to everyone who influenced me, debated with me, disagreed with me, and helped us make better decisions.”
Taubman joined Redfin from Amazon, where he was director of smart home verticals. He did not indicate what he plans to do next.
— Seattle-based Jay Lee is now chief marketing officer for Five9, a personalized customer experience company headquartered San Ramon, Calif. Lee joins Five9 from the Bellevue, Wash., company Icertis, where he was CMO for more than two years. He previously served in the same role at Avalara.
“Jay brings a rare combination of strategic marketing vision, creativity, and operational rigor, with a deep understanding of how to translate customer insight into meaningful business outcomes,” said Five9 CEO Amit Mathradas in a statement.
— Deidre Wendell announced her retirement from Seattle-based Accolade, where she served for more than 13 years, most recently as VP of product management. The health benefits firm was acquired last year by Transcarent. Before joining Accolade, Wendell was a senior executive at Accenture, where she spent 25 years.
On LinkedIn, she reflected that while at Accolade, she was “surrounded by like-minded individuals who were equally invested in helping people navigate healthcare to lead their best lives.”
— Seattle immigration tech startup Casium named Luke Lalor as a founding engineer. He joined Casium from Snow Leopard, which built technology to support AI developers, and was a co-founder of August Data, a startup offering an open-source framework for building generative AI apps.
— Frazier Healthcare Partners promoted Ryan Lucero to general partner. The Seattle-based healthcare investment firm last week announced several additional promotions and a new hire. Lucero has been with the company for nearly a decade.
