Tech moves: Fred Hutch leader goes to AWS; Temporal, Augmodo and Neuralwatt name execs. - Amitabha "Guppy" Gupta, a Fred Hutch Cancer Center associate director who helps researchers translate their work to broader audiences, is leaving after 14 years to join Amazon. Starting Nov. 16, he will be a strategic advisor for nonprofit research and advanced AI with AWS' Global Nonprofit Business. Gupta said technology was often an obstacle to scientific breakthroughs at Fred Hutch. "It's the infrastructure, data, and tools standing between a scientist and an answer," he wrote on LinkedIn. In his new role, "I'll work with researchers and research institutions on using cloud, high-performance computing, and AI to remove those barriers." - Microsoft board member Emma Walmsley has been appointed CEO of HP, effective Jan. 4. Walmsley, who led the pharmaceutical giant GSK until December 2025, succeeds Bruce Broussard. Reuters notes that her seven years serving on the Microsoft board "are her closest brush with the tech sector" prior to taking the top job at the PC maker. - Bas Nijholt, senior staff engineer at IonQ's Seattle-area facility, has resigned after three years to join an AI startup that's still in stealth mode. At IonQ, the theoretical quantum mechanics expert built MindRoom, an open-source collaboration and knowledge-sharing platform that he calls "a company brain." "With this new opportunity, I get to keep building and turbocharging MindRoom with a team of people who are just as excited about AI as I am," Nijholt said, adding that the tool will remain freely available. Before IonQ, Nijholt spent nearly four years at Microsoft. - Bellevue, Wash., startup Temporal, whose software keeps AI agents running reliably, has named Sean Heneghan as vice president of sales for the Americas. The company ranks No. 1 on the GeekWire 200, a list of the top Pacific Northwest startups. In September it raised $550 million, putting its valuation at $12.55 billion. Temporal is fully remote, and Heneghan is based in the Chicago area. He joins the company from MongoDB. - Doug Heimburger, a 26-year Amazon veteran, has changed roles, shifting from chief financial officer and vice president of Worldwide Operations to CFO/VP of Worldwide Stores. In the new position, Heimburger said he'll help oversee efforts to improve delivery speed, reduce costs and increase growth of the Stores business. His first role at the company was data mining analyst. - Seattle startup Augmodo has named Capri Brixey as head of retail sales. The company, which sells AI-powered wearable devices with cameras, raised $21 million in July to expand from in-store applications that let workers passively track inventory into automotive, warehouse and hospital settings. Augmodo ranks No. 122 on the GeekWire 200. Ross Finman, founder and CEO of Augmodo, called Brixey "the right leader to accelerate our expansion" given her experience selling to both retail and warehouse operations. Her past roles include leadership positions at Coca-Cola and Kroger. - Meaghan Davison Praznik was named vice president of marketing for Neuralwatt, a Seattle-based startup that built a tool for calculating, in real time, the carbon emissions of individual AI requests. Her former employers include Clif Bar, AllTrails and Merino Energy. Because the carbon intensity of grid power varies throughout the day and across regions, Neuralwatt's technology can help customers run compute-intensive operations when clean energy is more abundant. - BuyWander, an auction-based online marketplace for returned and overstocked retail items, has named Chris Holm as senior director of product. Holm spent nine years at Amazon, leaving in 2024 after managing last-mile and same-day delivery technology and working on Amazon Fresh delivery. He has since served as a consultant for carbon removal startup Lithos Carbon and as a founder-in-residence at the startup studio Foundations. In August, BuyWander moved its headquarters across Washington from Spokane to Kent. The company announced $21 million in new funding in September. - T-Mobile's Kevin Lau has joined the advisory board at the University of Washington's College of Engineering. Lau has been with the telecom giant for 22 years over two stints and serves as VP of digital experience engineering. He holds bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the UW. - Christian Smith, an Issaquah, Wash.-based tech leader, has been named president of revenue for Cloudflare, which provides security and speed services for websites and online applications. He will oversee worldwide go-to-market operations. Smith previously served as chief revenue officer for Splunk and Nintex.

Google Cloud & Temporal launch serverless workers. Fri, 16th Oct 2026 (Today) Google Cloud and Temporal have introduced Temporal Serverless Workers on Cloud Run, now in preview on Temporal Cloud. The offering lets developers run Temporal workers in Cloud Run worker pools that scale with activity in Temporal task queues. Temporal Cloud manages instance counts through the Cloud Run Admin API, while the worker code continues to run in the customer's own Google Cloud project, under the customer's service account and network settings. Temporal is an open-source execution platform for orchestrating distributed systems and AI agent workloads. Its workers poll for tasks rather than wait for incoming web requests, which has often pushed users towards Kubernetes clusters or virtual machines that stay provisioned even when queues are idle. Cloud Run worker pools are designed for background jobs without a public endpoint. In this setup, Temporal workers poll Temporal Cloud for tasks, and Temporal tracks queue conditions before adjusting worker pool size. Scaling model Temporal uses backlog-to-worker latency as its main scaling signal. When the delay between a task entering a queue and a worker picking it up crosses a threshold, the Temporal server notifies a worker controller, which adds capacity to the relevant worker pool. Scale-in is handled more cautiously. Temporal waits through a stabilisation period after the last time a task found no available worker, then reduces capacity in stages rather than cutting instance counts immediately. Instance counts remain within customer-defined minimum and maximum levels. If the first task after an idle period cannot tolerate startup delay, users can keep the minimum above zero. Otherwise, the platform can reduce the pool to zero when no work is pending. A central change is the removal of some workarounds previously needed to run Temporal workers on standard Cloud Run services. Those deployments typically required an HTTP listener, instance-based billing to keep CPU available between requests, and minimum instances to avoid scaling fully down. By contrast, worker pools have no public URL and do not require a load balancer. Google Cloud said they are priced at almost 40% less per vCPU-hour and GB-hour than instance-billed Cloud Run services, while also avoiding revision changes when only instance counts are adjusted. Version control The launch also addresses one of the more difficult aspects of operating Temporal workflows: updating worker code without disrupting running executions. Because Temporal workflows are stateful and deterministic, changing code mid-run can create non-determinism errors. To avoid that, the Cloud Run deployment model requires Temporal Worker Versioning. Each Worker Deployment Version runs as its own worker pool deployment, identified by a deployment name and build ID. Older versions can remain at zero instances until a workflow created on that version needs to run again. This allows workflows that started on one worker version to continue on that same version, while newer workflows are directed to a current or target deployment based on configuration. As older workflow executions drain away, the related worker pool can then be reduced to zero automatically. Two versioning behaviours are available. Under PINNED, a workflow stays on the build ID on which it started. Under AUTO_UPGRADE, a workflow moves to the new current or target Worker Deployment Version during rollout. The companies highlighted several use cases, including AI agents, long-running workflows and batch processing. In AI-related workloads, worker pools can scale up to handle bursts of model calls, embeddings or API activity, then scale down once queues empty. The configuration also supports attaching GPUs to workers, with those GPU-backed workers still able to scale to zero. For long-running workflows, the approach is intended to match uneven compute demand. A workflow may alternate between short tasks, long-running steps and periods of inactivity while waiting for external input from a person or another system. Batch jobs are another target. Since worker pools incur charges only while instances are running, organisations can leave a pool idle at zero between periodic runs such as billing cycles or media transcoding jobs, while using maximum instance limits to cap spend during peaks. Tampi Yellapragada, Product Manager at Google Cloud, wrote that the aim was to align Cloud Run worker pools with systems built around pull-based work rather than request-response patterns: "We built Cloud Run worker pools for exactly this kind of pull-based work: Your instances connect to a queue or stream, take the next item, and process it." He added: "Starting today, Temporal Cloud, which is the fully managed version of Temporal's open-source platform, can scale them for you."