Simon Prakash, an Apple veteran with eight years of service, has left the Cupertino company to join its rival Google. Prakash most recently served as the senior director of product integrity and was responsible for product quality across all Apple product lines.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Prakash was the director of engineering design validation at Cielo Communications and a reliability and FA manager at 3Com before he joined Apple. He will join Google in an unknown capacity working on a "secret project" says Venture Beat.

Prakash will supposedly begin at Google starting Monday. Given his background in hardware and product quality, he will likely work with Motorola Mobility on their future cell phones and tablets. This is based on speculation as neither Google nor Apple has commented on Prakash's change of employment.