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New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is initiating a leadership overhaul and hiring many of her past colleagues at Instacart, Meta, and Microsoft‘s CoreAI product as quarterly Xbox hardware sales collapse another 33%.
CNBC reports on a memo shared internally at Xbox on May 5 announcing the changes. Sharma tells staff, “We need to evolve how we work and how we are organized across our platform,” according to CNBC. As part of this goal, 24-year Microsoft veterans Kevin Gammill and Roanne Sones will leave their current positions.
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One of these hires is Jared Palmer, former vice president of Microsoft’s CoreAI product and senior vice president of its GitHub platform, who will join Xbox as vice president of engineering. He writes – opaquely – in an announcement on Twitter, “I’ll be focused on building world-class tools, services, and experiences for developers and players across the Xbox ecosystem.”
Excited to share that I’m joining @Xbox as VP, Engineering & Technical Advisor to CEO @asha_shar I’ll be focused on building world-class tools, services, and experiences for developers and players across the Xbox ecosystem.Grateful for the opportunity and excited to get to… pic.twitter.com/6SMsfLqlODMay 5, 2026
Ex-Instacart senior director of product growth David Schloss will also now manage Xbox’s subscriptions and Cloud product, as he confirms in his just-updated LinkedIn identifying himself as “Leadership at Xbox.”
Palmer, Schloss, and Sharma’s three other new hires – Jonathan McKay, Tim Allen, and Evan Chaki – all previously worked with Sharma during her time at either CoreAI, Instacart, or Meta in the past. Some held jobs at multiple of those companies. McKay, for example, spent time at both Meta and CoreAI; he started his career as a US diplomat stationed in Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh, and has also worked at OpenAI on ChatGPT.
Sharma adds in her memo, reported by The Verge, “Our goal with this [leadership] change is simple: build a platform that is affordable, personal, and open by staying close to the work and the people we serve.”
Sharma does seem to have been actively pursuing these principles within Xbox since her surprise appointment to CEO in February. She’s recently admitted to employees that Xbox Game Pass is “too expensive” amid her publicly re-renaming Microsoft Gaming to Xbox, demonstrating an obvious desire to turn back the clock as Xbox sales get sadder.