20 Big Microsoft Executive Hires So Far In 2025

Microsoft Canada’s new president, a corporate vice president overseeing Copilot Studio and multiple recruits from Google DeepMind are among the list-makers.

A new president of Microsoft Canada. A corporate vice president overseeing the Copilot Studio artificial intelligence agent building platform. And multiple recruits from Google DeepMind.

These are among the biggest Microsoft executive hires that the Redmond, Wash.-based technology giant has done so far in 2025 as the tech talent wars heat up in a variety of highly competitive markets, including artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.

CRN culled through news reports and posts on Microsoft-owned LinkedIn to compile this list, giving extra weight to entries based on the recruit’s Microsoft role and whether they left a major Microsoft competitor.

[RELATED: 20 Tech Companies Hiring In The IT Channel: August 2025]

Microsoft Hires

Microsoft declined to comment for this article. The vendor has about 500,000 channel partners worldwide and is working to increase the overall percentage of company revenue that comes through the channel, according to CRN’s 2025 Channel Chiefs.

While the largest technology companies are always jockeying for top talent, the human capital battle has reached a new level in the era of artificial intelligence. Facebook parent Meta offered $200 million over several years to hire Ruoming Pang, who ran Apple’s AI models team, according to a Bloomberg article from July.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during an appearance on his brother’s podcast this summer that Meta has tried to hire away a variety of his employees with signing bonuses as high as $100 million.

Read on for some of the biggest hires Microsoft has made so far this year.

Tina Schuchman

VP, Engineering, CoreAI Agent Platform

Schuchman returned to Microsoft in February in a role where she will work on “a foundational layer that empowers developers to create transformative, agent-driven AI experiences.”

Her team is “crafting a robust end-to-end development experience—spanning ideation, iteration, deployment, and observability” for developers and “delivering front-end and back-end frameworks that support both single-agent and multi-agent operations,” according to her LinkedIn account.

She previously left Microsoft in 2011 after about two years with the tech giant. She left with the title of software developer engineer. In that role, she “architected, designed, and developed features for Outlook For Mac using Objective-C (Cocoa) and C++” as part of her responsibilities.

Before returning to the Copilot maker, she worked at Atlassian for about two years as vice president and head of engineering for the growth platform. Her resume includes about three years with Facebook parent Meta, leaving in 2023 as senior director of engineering.

In that role, she “scaled out Meta VR’s developer platform, supporting internal developers, external developers, and content managers” and was “responsible for a team of ~300 incredible engineers, owning areas including our app store, growth & monetization, developer success, ranking, integrity, and privacy,” according to her LinkedIn account.

Mario Zeng

VP, Hardware System Engineering

In January, Microsoft brought on Zeng after he worked at Lenovo for about 17 years.

With Microsoft, he leads “systems engineering and product development across Azure’s hardware life cycle,” according to his LinkedIn account.

He left Lenovo with the title of vice president and general manager, according to his LinkedIn account. Past roles with Lenovo include executive director of business development, product management, operations and rack solution development.

His director position had him “leading product management, business operations, and customer service operations for a suite of hyperscale products.” He would also “engage existing Hyperscale customers, with a concentration on providing guidance related to infrastructure, procurement, engineering, and data center operations.”

His resume includes about four years with Asus, leaving the company in 2007.

Ashish Kelkar

Corporate VP, CoreAI Data Science

Kelkar joined Microsoft in January, bringing with him about 13 years of experience as vice president of infrastructure and operations at Facebook parent Meta.

In this role, he “led a team of 300+ operations analysts, capacity planners, statisticians and data engineers in the Infrastructure engineering and Operations team, developing analytics and business frameworks for capacity planning, investments and growth of Facebook's infrastructure,” according to his LinkedIn account.

His resume includes about seven years with Google. He left the vendor in 2010 with the title of principal of mergers and acquisitions.

Dan Lewis

Corporate VP, Copilot Studio

Lewis returned to Microsoft in February after leaving the vendor about 14 years ago.

Lewis initially joined Microsoft as chief product officer for business and industry solutions and Copilot AI, but in June he shifted to his current title. In this role, he is “responsible for Copilot Studio, our AI Agent and agentic application building platform for enterprise customers and M365 Copilot users” while “separately running an accelerator for AI-first teams at Microsoft,” according to his LinkedIn account.

His previous Microsoft tenure was about three years. He left the vendor in 2011 as a group product manager.

In 2015, he co-founded trucking platform company Convoy and led it as CEO. Convoy closed in 2023, with Flexport buying its assets.

His resume includes about two years with Amazon, leaving in 2015 as a general manager for new shopping experiences technology.

Umesh Shankar

Corporate VP, Microsoft AI Engineering

Shankar joined Microsoft in March after about 19 years with Google. He left Google with the title of chief technologist and distinguished engineer in Google Cloud security.

At Google, he led “large initiatives that impact our Security SaaS products and the security of the GCP platform overall,” according to his LinkedIn account. He focused on AI security in the platform and infusing generative AI capabilities across Google SecOps, Google Threat Intelligence and other parts of the portfolio suite.

He also worked on Google’s SecLM model that combines “multi-step reasoning, security-optimized retrieval, and authoritative threat intelligence on top of multiple AI/ML models, to perform security tasks and support agential workflows with higher accuracy and minimal prompt engineering.”

Part of his role at Microsoft is building a team to work on the Copilot data stack, secure patterns for agential orchestration, scalable infrastructure for integrating with data and action services and APIs and the substrate for personalized context-sharing across experiences.

Matthew Milton

President, Microsoft Canada

In August, Microsoft hired Milton after he spent about 19 years with IBM and about four years with IBM spinoff Kyndryl.

He left Kyndryl with the title of senior vice president of finance and strategy, according to his LinkedIn account. The solution provider spun off from IBM in 2021 and originally brought Milton on as its U.S. division president.

His last role with IBM before the Kyndryl spin-out was general manager of financial services for North America. In this role, he led “all aspects of a 2,000+ employee North American business unit with direct ownership of P&L, business strategy and 10-figure annual revenues from Cloud, AI and Outsourcing solutions” and managed relationships “across a portfolio of 1,000 Financial Services clients,” among other responsibilities.

Adam Sadovsky

Corporate VP, Microsoft AI

Sadovsky is among a series of DeepMind employees Microsoft has hired from Google as the AI race heats up.

He joins the Microsoft AI business unit headed by CEO Mustafa Suleyman, who co-founded DeepMind in 2010, sold the company to Google in 2014 and left Google in 2022 to co-found Inflection. Microsoft hired Suleyman in 2024.

Sadovsky left Google DeepMind with the title of distinguished software engineer and senior director, where he served on the engineering leadership team for Google AI model Gemini and worked on model post-training, Workspace integrations, tooling, infrastructure and more, according to his LinkedIn account.

He spent about 17 years with DeepMind parent Google in total. Over the years at Google, he worked on assistant natural language processing, search infrastructure and Vanadium, a privacy and security hardened variant of the open-source Chromium browser project.

Amar Subramanya

Corporate VP, Microsoft AI

Subramanya joining the Copilot maker in July was a homecoming of sorts seeing as the corporate vice president previously worked at Microsoft in 2005 and 2006 as an intern and then as a visiting researcher.

In the 16 years since, he gained experience working on AI projects with Google. He left Google with the title of vice president of engineering and worked on the Gemini application during his time with the Microsoft rival, according to his LinkedIn account.

His roles at Google over the years included principal engineer and staff research scientist.

Carmen Krueger

Corporate VP, U.S. Federal

Krueger came to Microsoft in September after about 20 years with enterprise applications rival SAP.

In her new role, she will support U.S. federal agencies, “meeting and collaborating with our incredible customers and partners to help them harness the full power of Microsoft’s innovative solutions in service to their stakeholders,” according to her LinkedIn account.

She left SAP with the title of COO and chief business officer, a role in which she was “responsible for the North America Region renewals, pipeline and line of business revenue with end-to-end customer lifecycle responsibilities.”

Past SAP roles included managing director of regulated industries and senior vice president of global business development and ecosystems.

Krueger is also a U.S. Navy veteran who spent about 12 years in the Judge Advocate General's Corps, leaving in 2007, according to her LinkedIn account.

Jennifer Weitzel

Corporate VP, Engineering, Procurement, Construction

Weitzel returned to Microsoft in June after serving as president of global data center company Ada Infrastructure for about three years.

Ada was acquired in March by alternative investment manager Ares Management Corp. as part of Ares’ purchase of GCP International, according to Ada.

Weitzel previously served as Microsoft’s vice president of cloud infrastructure lease and mergers and acquisition before leaving the vendor in 2022 to join Ada, according to her LinkedIn account.

Her resume includes about eight years with Digital Realty, leaving the data center company in 2016 with the title of senior vice president of commercial and global supply chain.

Dave Citron

Corporate VP, Microsoft AI Product

Another DeepMind departure to Microsoft, Citron left Google in August with the title of senior director of product for the Gemini application, capping off an 11-year tenure with the Chrome maker.

In his new role, his focus includes taking models from frontier to everyday value, agents that finish work for people, personalization, quality and safety, according to his LinkedIn account.

This marked a return to Microsoft for Citron, who previously worked for the Copilot maker for nine years. He left Microsoft in 2014 with the title of principal product management lead for OneDrive enterprise and infrastructure verticals.

In his previous role at Google, he “led product vision & strategy, and delivered next-gen experiences like Deep Research, Agent Mode, Veo3/Imagen4, Canvas, Gems, integration into Chrome & Workspace, and more,” according to his LinkedIn account.

He also “led Gemini app's expansion into Business, Enterprise, and Edu segments, growing product adoption and user engagement from 0 to millions of businesses & schools.”

Steve Gustavson

Corporate VP, Design, Research, Content

Gustavson left a role at ServiceNow and joined Microsoft in March. In his new role, he heads experience and Microsoft Learn content for the business and industry Copilot group.

His team includes about “400 product designers, content designers, visual designers, design engineers, UX researchers, design program managers, technical writers, publishers and more who lead experience design for Copilot Studio, Copilot Apps, Dynamics365, Power Platform, Microsoft Admin Center, Industry agent solutions, and the agent platform ecosystem,” accordingto his LinkedIn account.

Gustavson worked at ServiceNow for about three years, leaving with the title of group vice president for design. He “led design for the Now Platform, Now Assist (AI), and ServiceNow Impact, overseeing a global team of 190+ designers plus 80 dotted-line members in research, design ops, and tech writing.”

His resume includes about 13 years with Adobe, leaving in 2022 as senior director of web platform products and user experience. He joined Adobe in 2009 with the acquisition of Omniture, where he served as director of brand strategy, creative direction, web development and marketing localization, according to his LinkedIn account.

Lloyd Adams

Corporate VP, COO, Global Enterprise Sales

In May, Microsoft brought on Adams after he spent about 27 years with enterprise application rival SAP.

Adams concluded his time at SAP with the title of North America president, where he “steered top-level initiatives aimed at driving cloud and services bookings, renewals, and net bookings,” accordingto his LinkedIn account.

Part of his accomplishments in this role include “enabling cloud revenue exceeding 5.8B Euro, representing over 30% of SAP SE's total cloud revenue” and “delivering $1.75B in 2024 cloud bookings, achieving 19% YoY growth, despite reducing by almost 500 FTEs YoY.”

He was also helped with “maintaining average cloud annual contract value bookings above $200M for 10 consecutive quarters” and “delivering total cloud revenue of $12.8B since Q3 2022 while upholding consistent YoY growth rates between 18-20%,” according to his LinkedIn account.

Past roles with SAP have included senior vice president and managing director for the East and national vice president for SAP for utilities.

Mark D'Arcy

Corporate VP, Global Creative Director, Microsoft AI

D'Arcy was another recruit to Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s team this year.

He was described as “instrumental in teaching brands how to use social media” in a statement by Brandtech Group announcing that D’Arcy joined the digital marketing firm in 2022. He spent about two years with the firm as partner and chief creative officer working on metaverse, augmented reality and Web3 capabilities.

He brings with him about 10 years of experience from Facebook, leaving the social media giant in 2021 with the title of chief creative officer and vice president of global business marketing, according to his LinkedIn account.

He led “a team of creative strategists in 18 cities around the world tasked with creating and building ideas that transform how the world's largest and most innovative marketers use Facebook to drive business growth.”

Jacob Andreou

Corporate VP, Microsoft AI Product, Design, Growth

Andreou is part of Mustafa Suleyman’s Microsoft AI team building frontier AI for 1.6 billion devices.

He will also continue to work as a venture partner at Greylock, a role he has held since 2023, according to his LinkedIn account.

His resume includes about eight years with Snapchat parent Snap, leaving in 2023 with the title of senior vice president of product and growth.

Andreou “helped scale the company from its early days to 360M+ DAUs [daily active users] and $4.5B in revenue,” according to a Greylock statement on his hiring. He “played a key role in bringing their innovations to market, eventually leading hundreds of people on teams across all of Product, Design, Growth, Data Science, Analytics, and User Research.”

Philippe Rogge

Corporate VP, Worldwide Public Sector

Rogge returned to Microsoft in July after leaving the vendor in 2022 as regional president of Central and Eastern Europe.

Before his return, Rogge spent about two years with Vodafone, leaving in 2024 as CEO of the Germany division. A Vodafone statement on his hiring said that “he led sales, channels and marketing, and accelerated the company’s annual growth to double digits” in Central and Eastern Europe.

Past roles with Microsoft included chief operating officer of the China division and general manager of business in Belgium and Luxembourg, according to his LinkedIn account.

Rajneesh Singh

VP, Engineering, CoreAI Agent Foundry

One of the more recent big recruits to Microsoft, Singh came to the vendor after about 16 years with Amazon.

His most recent role with Amazon was director in the SageMaker AI group, according to his LinkedIn account. In this role, Singh worked to “build state of the art distributed training technology to enable customers to train, finetune and host foundational models.” SageMaker AI has 100,000-plus Amazon Web Services customer users.

His past Amazon roles include general manager of SageMaker's low code, no code group and director of engineering for AWS computer vision.

Betsy Matthies

VP, GitHub Global Revenue Operations, Enablement

Matthies came to Microsoft subsidiary GitHub in May after about three years with Amazon Web Services.

She left AWS with the title of global sales executive and engagement leader, according to her LinkedIn account. She previously served as AWS’ worldwide head of customer optimization and acceleration for about a year.

Her resume includes about three years with food and beverage company Compass Group USA, leaving the company in 2022 with the title of senior vice president of sales.

Jeff Galvin

Corporate VP, Financial Services Industry

Galvin’s role at Microsoft includes “leading efforts to help Asian banks and insurance companies scale and innovate with Microsoft’s Cloud, AI, and Cybersecurity platforms.”

He came to the tech giant in July after about 19 years on and off with McKinsey, according to his LinkedIn account. He most recently served as a senior partner at the consulting firm, working on “tech-related client work in Japan, particularly in financial services” and acting as Asia co-leader of “McKinsey QuantumBlack, our AI and data science org of 270 across 9 locations.”

His resume includes about five years with Google. He left the vendor in 2016 with the title of online partnerships group director for its Asia-Pacific business. In this role, he led a “120+ person BD/partnerships team responsible for scaled acquisition and management of mobile application developers and online publishers on Google’s AdSense, DoubleClick, AdMob and related platforms across Asia,” according to his LInkedIn account.

Lisa Monaco

President, Global Affairs

Microsoft brought on Monaco in July after she served as deputy attorney general of the U.S. during the Biden administration.

Deputy AG is the Department of Justice’s second-ranking official and “serves as the Chief Operating Officer, and the Department’s litigating and policy components, law enforcement agencies [with] 93 U.S. Attorneys report to her,” according to the DOJ’s website.

She was a partner at the law firm of O’Melveny & Myers for about two years, leaving in 2021, according to her LinkedIn account.

Her goal at Microsoft is to lead a team with “expertise across national security, cybersecurity, international government affairs, and global institutions … to help global governments and communities navigate digital transformation safely, protect people from emerging threats, and promote responsible innovation, including in AI,” according to her LinkedIn account.