Marc Whitten, a longtime Seattle-area tech executive, was named CEO at Cruise, the GM-backed self-driving company.
Whitten was most recently chief product and technology officer at gaming giant Unity Software. He resigned earlier this month.
Whitten previously spent more than four years leading Amazon’s entertainment devices division; was chief product officer at speaker company Sonos; and was at Microsoft for 17 years, where he was a founding engineer on the Xbox team.
“Joining Cruise is the easiest ‘yes’ in my career,” Whitten wrote on LinkedIn. “I’m inspired by its deep and meaningful mission and world-class technology, and most importantly the incredible team driving both of these things forward.”
He’ll take the reins at Cruise as the company comes off several speed bumps over the past year, including a grounding of its fleet following safety incidents involving its autonomous vehicles, as well as substantial layoffs.
The company’s CEO and co-founder Kyle Vogt resigned in November, and other executives were dismissed by the board following a safety review.
Whitten is still based in the Seattle region but he plans to relocate to Austin, Texas, to be closer to family, according to a Cruise spokesperson. Cruise is based in San Francisco and offers employees flexible work arrangements.
Cruise previously had a Seattle-area engineering office but shut it down in December. The company laid off 67 employees in the Seattle region that same month.
Cruise was founded in 2013 and has raised a total of $10 billion. Microsoft was part of a $2 billion investment in Cruise in 2019. Other notable investors include Honda, Walmart, and T. Rowe Price.
The company began testing its cars in Seattle — with human drivers — in August, joining other self-driving vehicle companies currently testing in Seattle, including Zoox and NVIDIA.