Parakhin will oversee the engineering and data groups at the Ottawa-headquartered commerce company. He was most recently CEO for advertising and web services at Microsoft, and previously CTO of Moscow-headquartered Yandex. (The Logic)

Talking point: Allan Leinwand, Shopify’s last CTO, left in January 2023, and at the time CEO Tobi Lütke told staff he was “retiring the CTO jersey.” At Microsoft, Parakhin ran the team that incorporated AI models from partner OpenAI into the tech giant’s products, including search engine Bing and Copilot, its consumer chatbot and workplace assistant. He left that role in March, after Microsoft hired Mustafa Suleyman as its AI CEO; Parakhin has since taken advisory roles at AI startups Perplexity and Liquid AI. Shopify has built its own AI assistant for brands and stores that use its e-commerce technology, based on models from OpenAI as well as open-source ones. Parakhin’s hire is the latest tie to Microsoft; the U.S. tech giant’s CTO Kevin Scott joined Shopify’s board in July.