Report: Google's Pixel division has lost Marc Levoy, the engineer behind the camera, and GM Mario Queiroz in less than a year, as sales disappoint
The general manager for the Pixel division is also gone. — What you need to know — According to The Information, Marc Levoy and Mario Queiroz have both left Google. Source: The Information .
Context & Ripple Effects
The exit trail is longer than this report suggests: Mario Queiroz had already left the hardware unit in August 2019, moving to Sundar Pichai's office, so The Information's report closes out a departure that began as an internal transfer rather than a sudden loss. Marc Levoy's exit is the sharper blow — he built the computational photography stack that was the Pixel line's main differentiator against better-distributed rivals.
The timing matters because both departures land against disappointing Pixel sales, and the corpus shows the pattern didn't reverse: Google went on to cut several hundred hardware engineers concentrated in AR in 2024, then hundreds more across the platforms-and-devices unit covering Android, Pixel, and Chrome in 2025 after January buyouts.
First-order effects
- The Pixel division is simultaneously without its general manager and the engineer behind its camera advantage, exactly when weak sales make the product's differentiation case hardest to defend internally.
Second-order effects
- Levoy's expertise doesn't leave the market — Adobe hired him weeks later to build a universal camera app, meaning the computational-photography know-how that set Pixel apart could be spread across other Android devices instead.
Third-order effects
- Read alongside the 2024 AR-focused engineering cuts and the 2025 platforms-and-devices reductions, the leadership drain points to Google steadily de-emphasizing first-party hardware as a standalone business rather than fixing it — with each round of exits and layoffs narrowing what remains of the original Pixel team.
The trend: Google's hardware unit is contracting through successive leadership exits and workforce reductions, while its key talent migrates to software-first companies.