Technological moves: Lyft hires CFO from Amazon; Tomo adds CMO; Gopuff taps into more talent in Seattle

– Tomo, a new real estate startup led by former Zillow executives, announced Sarah Makar as CMO. She is also an alumnus of Zillow and was previously the SVP of the marketing department at Zillow Group.

Makar left Zillow in 2019 after seven years and was most recently a consultant. She was previously an executive director at Expedia.

Tomo launched its digital platform to speed up the mortgage approval process this year after $70 million seed round.

– Lyft rented Elaine Paul, formerly CFO and VP of Finance for Amazon Studios, as its new CFO. Paul joined Amazon in 2019 and has previously worked at Hulu and Disney.

– Social media management tool Hootsuite has appointed four new board members:

As part of the changes, Twitch COO Sara Clemens and CEO of BroadbandTV Corp Shahrzad Rafati is stepping down from the board.

The 13-year-old Vancouver, BC-based company is planning an IPO in 2022, according to a report by BetaKit.

– Esper is hired on DevOps platform based on Bellevue, Wash. Sudhir Reddy as the SVP of engineering.

Reddy was most recently Chef’s vice president of global engineering, purchased last year. Prior to becoming Chef, he was the technical lead at Intuit, Oracle. He also co-founded Clidentity.

Founded in 2018, Esper raised $90 million This year through two rounds of funding. Its customers include healthcare providers, educators, retailers, and restaurants that manage the company-owned fleet of Android devices.

– Former Director of Rental Sales of Zillow Rebecca Warner currently a sales SVP at the Leafly online cannabis market.

Based in New York, Warner previously worked at the Australian property market Domain. Kimberly Boler, also based in New York, recently joined Leafly as general counsel.

Seattle-based Leafly has gone go public through the SPAC . merger in August. Company next month Launch of the option to order cannabis in the app after Apple made changes to the App Store rules.

– Sales Manager of Tanium W. Thomas Stanley about to leave the company, According to Insider. He will be replaced by Tyker Fagg, currently the SVP of the Americas at the Kirkland, Wash-based cybersecurity firm.

– Amazon Veterans Cameron Janes joins REI as the new senior vice president, chief commercial officer. Janes previously spent more than 14 years at Amazon, most recently as a vice president for the company’s physical retail stores. He departed last month. Read more.

– Gopuff continues to tap the Seattle area for talent with additions Kerry people is Vice President of Global Supply Chain, Engineering Operations, and Delivery. He’s the sixth executive that the Philadelphia-based delivery service has hired this year, and one of several former Amazonians now working at Gopuff.

The most recent person was head of operations at Convoy. Previously, he worked for more than a decade at Amazon, where he was most recently VP of Logistics at Amazon North America.

In one post on LinkedIn, Person mentioned former colleagues he’s reunited with at Gopuff and said he’s “happy [to] rejoining many of the people I’ve loved working with in the past, including Tim Collins, Steven Harman and Sanjay Shah, among others. “

Gopuff is an on-demand delivery service for convenience store items. Its latest valuation is 15 billion dollars.

– Announcement of the University of Washington A-Alpha Bio spinout Padma Kodukula as a business manager. Based in California, she was most recently the sales manager for Precision NanoSystems.

Kodukula has previously held business development roles at Human Long Life, Life Technologies, and Prometheus Laboratories.

“The potential unleashed by A-Alpha Bio’s ability to measure, understand and design protein-protein interactions can hardly be overstated,” says Kodukula.

Established in 2017, A-Alpha Bio closes $20 million Series A round in September. The early-stage biotech company has partnerships with three major pharmaceutical companies and is also working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

– Computational biologist Robert Bradley Appointed scientific director of Fred Hutch .’s Center for Translational Data Science Integration Research, a program that applies data science to cancer and disease research. He was a scientist at the Seattle-based cancer research center for more than a decade.

– Co-founder of Scener Joe Braidwood leave the virtual clock party platform to join based in San Diego Vektor Medical. Braidwood will help the 4-year-old company set up a new subsidiary from its Bellevue, Wash. offices.

Vektor Medical’s vMap technology recently received FDA approval. vMap uses electrocardiogram (ECG) data to non-invasively detect sources of arrhythmias or irregular heartbeats.

Prior to Scener, Braidwood was VP of Marketing at Seattle Start-up TraceMe and before that CMO at SwiftKey, acquired by Microsoft in 2016.

—Van Vancouver, based at BioHarvest Sciences appointed astronaut Chris Hadfield to its advisory board. The biotech company plans to expand its plant bio-cell technology for applications in space exploration and settlement.

Apprenti, a nonprofit program of the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA), announced three additions to its leadership team:

• Al . Cave promoted to COO. Based in Sacramento, California, Cave joined Apprenti in 2019 as national practice lead. He was previously an officer at the Northern Trust.
• Laurie Martin was hired as a sales manager. She is based in San Francisco and was most recently the SVP of global sales at management consulting firm Lee Hecht Harrison.
• Lisa Wallace participate as the VP of the program. Based in Austin, Texas, Wallace was previously the regional vice president of nonprofit sales for Salesforce.

Apprenti operates a year-long technology apprenticeship program in 16 states or major metropolitan areas around the country. Launched as a WTIA initiative in 2016 and expanded nationally shortly thereafter. Since the beginning of the pandemic, WTIA has increasingly look beyond its home state for talent.