ByteDance hit by consecutive senior tech executive departures within a week: Zhang Xin, Vice President of Volcano Engine, is also set to leave.

Beating AI News Flash: According to a message from Shen Ma's social circle, Zhang Xin, Vice President of ByteDance's Volcano Engine and Head of Governance and Operations of ByteDance's Open Source Committee, is about to leave the company.

Zhang Xin is a veteran technical figure in China's cloud-native field. He earned his bachelor's degree from Tsinghua University and a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. After graduation, he joined Google and participated in the early development of Kubernetes, with his code contributions once ranking among the global top ten.

Kubernetes is one of the most important open-source technologies in cloud computing today, capable of automatically managing the deployment, operation, and scaling of large numbers of applications. Zhang Xin left Google in 2015 to return to China and start a business, founding CaiCloud Technology, which specializes in helping enterprises deploy and manage Kubernetes.

In 2020, ByteDance wholly acquired CaiCloud Technology, and Zhang Xin joined Volcano Engine with his team to take charge of the cloud-native business. In 2021, ByteDance decided to formally enter the public cloud infrastructure market, attempting to become the "fourth cloud in China" alongside Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Huawei Cloud. This business was also led by Zhang Xin at the time.

With the rise of large models, Zhang Xin also participated in promoting the development of Volcano Engine's enterprise agent platform HiAgent. Initially, this product helped enterprises quickly develop AI applications, and later gradually expanded to agent operation, management, and performance evaluation.

In June of this year, in an interview with TMTPost, he proposed that the competitive focus of enterprise Agents is shifting from "building Agents" to "managing Agents." He found that some enterprises have already deployed hundreds of Agents but cannot even clearly say who is using them, how many Tokens are consumed per day, or how much work is actually completed. Zhang Xin hopes enterprises can manage these digital employees the same way they manage human employees, and even decide based on performance which ones should be taken offline and which deserve additional investment.

He estimated at the time that the future market size of Agent platforms could reach RMB 50 billion to RMB 100 billion, with the real explosive growth period likely to emerge between the end of 2026 and 2027.

In the past week, ByteDance has also successively seen news of multiple technical personnel departures. Shi Lingxiang, head of Volcano Engine's innovation incubation, was reported to have left to start a business, and Shi Yunfeng, head of the AI chip and DPU team, has also submitted a resignation request.