Meta’s head of engineering to step down; third top executive to exit this month after Sheryl Sandberg

A top Meta executive who was in charge of the social media company’s data centre and infrastructure business is leaving after 11 years. A news report in the Verge claims that David Mortenson, the head of engineering is stepping down from his position. The announcement was made in an internal memo sent to the company employees. 

Mortenson is the third departure of a top executive at Meta this month. On June 2, Sheryl Sandberg announced that she is stepping down from her position as Meta’s chief operating officer after 14 years. Sandberg will continue to be a part of the company as a board member. 

Two days later, Meta announced that its vice president of AI Jerome Pesenti will also leave the company in June after four years. 

Santosh Janardan, who has been at Meta since 2009 and is currently the vice president of engineering and infrastructure, will take on Mortenson’s role later this month. Prior to Meta, Janardan has also worked at Google as a Principal Database administrator (DBA) for Google and later YouTube. Janardan holds a BE in mechanical engineering from Sardar Patel University in Gujarat and an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. 

Also read: Sheryl Sandberg leaves Facebook after 14 years, Javier Olivan to take over as new COO

As head of engineering, Mortenson oversaw teams working on developing and operating the hardware, network, software, and data centres on which the various Meta services run. Before joining Meta in April 2011, Mortenson worked as the director of engineering for the .Net Framework Common Language Runtime at Microsoft. 

In the memo sent to Meta employees, Mortenson said that he was incredibly proud of everything his team has achieved over the past two years. “We survived the biggest capacity crunch in the company’s history and managed to stay productive as we shifted to work from home,” he added. 

Meta is undergoing a major transition. The company that has been largely driven by targeted ads is transforming into a metaverse company that will require a lot of hardware and infrastructure capabilities. Last October, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to build metaverse for work, entertainment, gaming, and social networking and also changed the company’s name to Meta Platforms to reflect that.