Senior Applied Scientist

Tech Moves: AWS data leader jumps to Oracle; Seattle Children's names new CIO; Zillow's new legal chief. by Todd Bishop on Aug 21, 2026 at 8:26 am - Mehul Shah joined Oracle as group vice president for OCI data and storage services, ending a 14-year run at Amazon and Amazon Web Services. In his last role at AWS, Shah led engineering and product for Amazon RDS for SQL Server, Oracle and Db2, and ran the launch and expansion of Oracle Database@AWS, the partnership that put Oracle's database inside Amazon's cloud. "Through that collaboration, I saw firsthand that OCI shares the same DNA that inspired me to join Amazon back in 2012," Shah said on LinkedIn, citing "deep curiosity, a passion to innovate, the courage to make bold decisions, and relentless drive to excel." Shah, who is based in Seattle, spent more than eight years at AWS, earlier leading real-time data streaming services including Amazon Data Firehose and Kinesis Data Streams, and serving as director and general manager of Amazon EMR. He started at Oracle this month. - Seattle Children's named Dr. Natalie Pageler senior vice president and chief information officer, putting her in charge of digital strategy and IT operations for the pediatric hospital system. Pageler comes from Stanford Children's Health and the Stanford University School of Medicine, where she was division chief of clinical informatics and earlier spent a decade as chief medical information officer. She is a pediatrician and clinical informaticist with more than 20 years of experience. Seattle Children's CEO Dr. Christopher Longhurst followed a similar path. He was chief medical information officer at Stanford Children's Health, the same role Pageler held, before spending a decade at UC San Diego Health, most recently as chief clinical and innovation officer. - Zillow Group named Cassandra "Sandi" Knight its first-ever chief legal and policy officer, a role the Seattle company created this month as part of a broader leadership shuffle. Reporting to CEO Jeremy Wacksman, she oversees Zillow's legal, compliance and government relations functions. Knight joins from Google, where she spent four years as a vice president leading global civil litigation and discovery. She was previously vice president and chief litigation counsel at PayPal, and spent 11 years at Morgan Stanley in senior litigation and compliance roles. She began her career as a trial lawyer at the San Diego Public Defender's Office, the firm Keker & Van Nest and the San Francisco City Attorney's office. She holds a law degree from Stanford and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She arrives at a busy moment: Zillow and Redfin are set to go to trial Aug. 24 as defendants in an antitrust case brought by the FTC and five state attorneys general over the companies' $100 million rental listings deal. Zillow has spent $26 million on the case so far this year. Two longtime Zillow leaders are heading out: * Sara Bonert, vice president of industry engagement for Zillow Group and ShowingTime+, is leaving after nearly 20 years. One of Zillow's earliest employees, she joined in the fall of 2006 as director of broker services, helped build Zillow's first platform for taking in listing data, and signed the partner agreements that took the site from zero to a million listings in four months. * Jeff Tompkins, head of corporate real estate and operations, wrapped up almost five years with the company. Tompkins, who is based in Denver, ran Zillow's workplace strategy across North America and beyond. He said he will share his next role soon. - Amir Pelleg, a veteran of companies including Amazon and Convoy, is the new chief product officer at Uber Freight. He is based in Seattle, working out of the shared Uber and Uber Freight office on Second Avenue. At Amazon, Pelleg was principal product manager for Kindle Fire, launched the Dash Button and initiated Alexa's smart home controls, then incubated and launched Amazon Shipping in India, the U.K. and the U.S. as a director and general manager in Amazon Transportation. He was a vice president on Convoy's executive team until the Seattle freight startup shut down in 2023, then spent two and a half years at dental tech company Dandy. "I've seen what works and what fails in digital freight," Pelleg said in a Q&A posted by Uber Freight. - Seattle's Frazier Healthcare Partners added Wes Wheeler to its Growth Buyout team as an executive in residence, advising on diligence and on life science logistics and infrastructure. Wheeler was most recently CEO of LabConnect, a central laboratory services company serving clinical trials, and before that president of UPS Healthcare, where he built a vertical of 10,000 employees across 35 countries. During Operation Warp Speed he was the primary industry interface to the U.S. government, overseeing distribution of more than 1.5 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses to over 100 countries. - Dr. Heather Cheng was announced as the inaugural recipient of the Marty Lazarus Weiden Family Endowed Chair at Fred Hutch Cancer Center, which will fund her work detecting, preventing and treating hereditary cancers. Cheng is clinical director of cancer genetics programs at Fred Hutch and directs its prostate cancer genetics clinic. In 2016 she was part of a team that found more than 10% of men with advanced prostate cancer carry inherited mutations in DNA-repair genes such as BRCA1 and BRCA2. The chair is named for Marty Lazarus Weiden, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1993 and died in 2001. The family learned only later that some of its members carry a BRCA mutation. - Microsoft corporate vice president Darryl Willis was named to the board of ONE Nuclear Energy, a natural gas and advanced nuclear developer going public this quarter through a merger with Hennessy Capital Investment Corp. Willis has led Microsoft's energy and resources group since 2019. He was previously a Google Cloud vice president and a BP executive who ran the company's Deepwater Horizon claims process and testified before Congress. He will officially join the board when the merger closes, and he is expected to chair its compensation committee. - Jake Milstein was named head of healthcare solutions marketing at Zscaler, a return to healthcare cybersecurity. He joins from application security company Contrast Security and was earlier chief marketing and revenue officer at Critical Insight, the Bremerton, Wash.-based security firm acquired by Lumifi Cyber. Before moving into technology, Milstein spent a decade at Seattle's KIRO TV, including four years as news director. - Michele Mehl left Amazon Web Services after nearly two and a half years to become senior public relations manager at ALSO, arriving the same week the electric vehicle company announced a $150 million Series D round led by Prysm Capital. ALSO builds the TM-B consumer electric bike and the TM-Q commercial delivery quad, and counts Amazon and DoorDash among its commercial partners. - Richard Van Bibber was named senior vice president of research and development at Verasonics, the Kirkland, Wash.-based maker of ultrasound research platforms used in fields including biomedical ultrasound, materials science and earth sciences. Van Bibber has spent much of a 25-year medtech career in the Puget Sound region, including seven years as director of research at Kirkland's Cardiac Dimensions and five years leading clinical affairs at Bellevue-based Aortica. - Dave Cotter joined the board of Nickson, the apartment-furnishing startup led by Cameron Johnson, alongside MarcyPen Capital Partners and Larry Braithwaite. Cotter is CEO of Greenwood and has previously worked at Amazon, Nordstrom, zulily, RealNetworks and Leafly. - PCC Community Markets president and CEO Krish Srinivasan will retire effective Jan. 29, 2027. Srinivasan was chief financial officer at Remitly and vice president of finance at Lyft before joining the Seattle grocery co-op as CFO, and earlier held leadership roles at Amazon and Microsoft. - Seattle Foundation named Elizabeth Wong as chief philanthropy officer, reporting to President and CEO Alesha Washington. Wong spent more than a decade at Foundation Source and earlier worked directly with the Gates family at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. And in case you missed it: - Jay Bartot, a co-founder of the airfare-prediction startup Farecast and former chief technology officer of Madrona Venture Labs, was named CTO of Lev, the Pioneer Square Labs spinout building an "AI co-founder" for entrepreneurs. Read more here. - Expedia Group is parting ways with at least eight vice presidents and senior vice presidents, and promoted five other leaders, as it reorganizes its product and technology groups around AI. Read more in this GeekWire story.

New plaintiffs revive mortgage steering lawsuit targeting Zillow. Plaintiffs' attorneys filed a 3rd amended complaint in the lawsuit alleging Zillow required agents in its Zillow Flex program to steer clients to use Zillow Home Loans August 18, 2026 Three weeks after a judge dismissed a lawsuit targeting Zillow and its mortgage lending program, plaintiffs' attorneys have revived the suit and filed an amended complaint alleging that Zillow required agents to steer their homebuyer clients to Zillow Home Loans. Plaintiffs represented by the Seattle-based law firm Hagens Berman filed a third amended complaint late Monday that removes all brokerage defendants and focuses solely on five Zillow entities. It also adds new plaintiffs, including two who closed on homes this year. The lawsuit generally alleged that agents who were part of the Zillow Preferred program - rebranded from Zillow Flex - steered their clients to obtain a mortgage through Zillow Home Loans, the fastest-growing source of revenue for the portal giant. "If agents do not comply and fail to meet Zillow's steering quotas, the agents are dropped from the Zillow Preferred program...regardless of the agent's performance or the client's satisfaction," the new complaint says. "But if they do comply, they are rewarded with more leads." The plaintiffs allege that Zillow offers fewer loan packages than competing lenders, that its interest rates are higher than competitors' and that it doesn't offer assistance packages available to first-time homebuyers. Zillow's mortgage division grew revenue by 75 percent in the second quarter of this year compared to a year earlier, to $84 million. The division grew revenue more than twice as quickly as the next fastest-growing division of rentals. Zillow has consistently denied the allegations, and in a statement it pointed out that it has continuously been successful in fighting the lawsuit in all of its iterations. "This new complaint has just as little merit as the plaintiffs' five other attempts, which have all been unsuccessful," a Zillow spokesperson said in a statement. "A federal court dismissed every one of their claims last month, and our position hasn't changed since then: the tools Zillow provides for buyers are free, transparent and optional. Any claims to the contrary are baseless. We will continue to defend this case with the same confidence we've had throughout, regardless of how many times the plaintiffs refile." The company has pointed out that its tools are "free, transparent and optional." "Nothing about plaintiffs' latest amended complaint changes the facts, the law, or how Zillow operates. We remain confident in our position as we vigorously defend ourselves in court," the company said. The amended complaint alleges that Zillow began pressuring agents who obtain leads through the portal to work with its lending arm "immediately" after Zillow acquired Mortgage Lenders of America in 2018. The complaint references an article by Capitol Forum from last fall that cited agents who said they were required to communicate with clients through Zillow or Follow Up Boss, the client management system Zillow bought in 2023. "Agents said that through these apps Zillow records their phone calls and rates them on metrics like how quickly they start reciting a script provided by Zillow," the complaint said. "Former Zillow Preferred agents have reported being terminated from the program because they complied with their fiduciary duties by making loan recommendations that serve their clients' best interests, rather than steering them to ZHL, who offers a product that does not serve the clients' best interests." The proposed class action lawsuit alleges that Zillow violated the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA) and the Washington Consumer Protection Act, and it asks for unspecified damages to be determined at trial.