Canadian ecommerce giant Shopify is hiring former Microsoft executive Mikhail Parakhin as its new CTO.
Shopify president Harley Finkelstein
“The impact of [Parakhin’s] work across the broader tech industry runs deep.”
According to his LinkedIn, Parakhin had been with Microsoft since 2019, most recently serving as CEO of advertising and web services, with previous experience as the president of its web experiences team and its corporate vice-president of technology.
In a statement, Shopify said Parakhin led Microsoft’s artificial intelligence (AI) advancement by helping to build consumer and enterprise-facing products like Copilot. The company added that Parakhin is “one of the finest machine learning (ML) crafters on the planet” and said he will oversee its engineering and data organizations.
Parakhin has also previously served as the CTO of Russian ML-powered search engine company Yandex, where, according to Shopify’s statement, he developed multiple search engines, cloud services, and digital assistants.
Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobi Lütke said he has “deeply admired” Parakhin for years and praised his “deep expertise” in AI and ML in a post on X. In his own post, Shopify president Harley Finkelstein said the hire was a “huge win” for Shopify’s engineering and data teams, as well as merchants.
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“Mikhail is exceptional when it comes to engineering, machine learning, search, and AI,” Finkelstein said. “The impact of his work across the broader tech industry runs deep.”
Parakhin stepped down from his leadership role at Microsoft, where he was working on Microsoft’s search engine Bing, one week after the company appointed Google DeepMind alum Mustafa Suleyman as its AI chief and asked Parakhin to report to him, Bloomberg reported in March. Instead, Parakhin “decided to explore new roles” and was to report to Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott in the meantime, according to an internal memo acquired by The Verge.
Shopify’s last CTO, Allan Leinwand, left the company for “personal reasons” in early 2023. At the time of Leinwand’s departure, the company declined to share whether the company was looking for a new CTO and explained that Lütke was assuming leadership of the company’s research and development division.
On an earnings call earlier this month, Finkelstein said Shopify surpassed $1 trillion in cumulative gross merchandise volume and launched 150 product updates and features during its Summer 2024 Edition that included a slew of AI announcements.
Feature image courtesy Shopify.