Another senior Xbox executive has left the company. Jared Palmer has quit Xbox just two months after being appointed vice president of engineering and a technical adviser to chief executive Asha Sharma. He has joined artificial intelligence startup Cognition, where he will lead the company's engineering organisation.

Palmer's departure follows a series of high-profile leadership changes at Xbox. Long-time Microsoft Gaming chief Phil Spencer retired in February 2026 after 38 years at Microsoft, while Xbox President Sarah Bond also left during the same leadership reshuffle.

Palmer announced his exit in a post on X, writing: "Personal update: I've joined @Cognition to lead engineering. I'm grateful to @asha_shar and everyone at Xbox for an amazing year. Excited for this next chapter with @ScottWu46 and team." His LinkedIn profile has also been updated to show that he is now Vice President of Engineering at Cognition.

His exit comes only weeks after Sharma named him as part of her new Xbox leadership team during a management reshuffle in May. At the time, Sharma said Palmer would report directly to her and work on "our most complex product and engineering problems", focusing on developer tools, infrastructure and engineering strategy.

Before joining Xbox, Palmer spent around eight months as Microsoft's Vice President of Product in its CoreAI division, which Sharma previously led before becoming Xbox CEO. Prior to Microsoft, Palmer spent nearly four years at AI infrastructure company Vercel, where he served as Vice President of AI.

Why did he leave Xbox?

While Palmer has not publicly disclosed the reason for his swift departure from Xbox. However his next move takes him back to the frontier of AI. He has joined Cognition, the AI startup behind Devin, an autonomous software engineering agent capable of planning, writing, testing and deploying production code within existing codebases.

His exit marks a notable loss for Xbox, where he was brought in to work closely with CEO Asha Sharma on developer tools, infrastructure and other complex engineering initiatives.

The departure also comes at a turbulent time for Xbox. The gaming division is currently undergoing what Sharma has described as a complete "reset", which includes cutting around 3,200 jobs (roughly 20 per cent of its workforce) and spinning off or transferring four internal studios, including Double Fine and Compulsion Games.

In an internal memo announcing the restructuring, Sharma described Xbox's business as "not healthy", pointing to slowing console growth, profit margins that trail rival gaming platforms by three to ten times, and an increasingly complex organisational structure. The overhaul aims to flatten management, streamline operations and strengthen accountability across the business.

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Published By:

Divya Bhati

Published On:

Jul 22, 2026 11:24 IST