Engineering Director Mark Lucovsky is apparently leaving Google after five years at the company. He will be moving to a position at VMware, the virtualization software company, according to TechCrunch. He has played an important part at Google, developing several APIs, most notably the Search APIs.

Lucovsky previously worked at DEC and several startups, building mini-supercomputers during the early eighties. His expertise was mostly in operating systems, UNIX and other proprietary OSes, which is why he was hired by Microsoft, where he went on to work for 16 years. His work focused mostly on the Windows NT kernel, which was used by the software giant in several operating systems including Windows 2000 and Windows XP and still has a major influence today. With the NT kernel he worked on the kernel executive, kernel32 and the Windows API.

Finally, in 2004 Lucovsky decided to leave Microsoft, a move that made CEO Steve Ballmer less than happy, especially when he heard it was for Google. The news apparently made him throw a chair across his office and describe Google CEO Eric Schmidt with not-so-kind words and vowing to “kill” Google. As it stands, Google is alive and well while Microsoft is still struggling with its search business, which only recently, with the launch of Bing, has managed to get some positive remarks from experts and users alike.

Google will likely also survive the departure though losing one of your key engineers can't be a very good thing for the company, especially as it seems that more and more people are leaving the company looking for greener pastures.