Facebook appoints Christopher Cox as Director of Product, promotes Mike Schroepfer to VP of Engineering

Venture Beat — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 17:11:28 -0400

Facebook has just orchestrated another shuffle in its management team, in the latest sign that founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is turning to the company’s engineering roots by promoting top lieutenants.

Facebook has appointed Christopher Cox as director of product, a significant position because he will control the direction of future product releases. Cox (pictured left; his Facebook thumbnail is all we have right now) was formerly director of human resources. Before that, he was an early engineer who helped come up with the popular news feed feature.

Facebook will also appoint Mike Schroepfer, until now a leading engineer, as Vice President of Engineering. Schroepfer (pictured below) has been at the company for barely more than two months. But when he arrived in late July from Mozilla, Facebook said it would appoint a VP of Engineering that Schroepfer would report to. Apparently, Facebook has abandoned that step, and simply made Schroepfer the boss.

The moves are significant because they come at a time when Facebook has experienced some high-profile exits. Some of the departures were early employees; others were outsiders hired later in the company’s life. In one recent case, a leading marketing executive Benjamin Ling, left Facebook, and returned to Google less than a year after his departure.

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Facebook appoints Christopher Cox as Director of Product, promotes Mike Schroepfer to VP of Engineering