Facebook Monday announced that Mike Schroepfer, who led the Firefox development team at Mozilla Corp., has agreed to join Facebook as director of engineering.

Schroepfer, who was vice president of engineering at Mozilla, will be responsible for leading the front-end and platform engineering teams at Facebook, the social network said. Before joining Mozilla, Schroepfer was chief technology officer of the for data center automation division at Sun Microsystems Inc. and a Sun distinguished engineer.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook. noted that Schroepfer has extensive experience building products and engineering teams. "At Mozilla, he built Firefox 3 and manages the product development process -- a particularly impressive position given the global, collaborative and open process in which Mozilla operates and develops its products," he noted in a statement. "Facebook has similar values and Mike will be a great addition to our engineering team."

Justin Smith, a blogger at Inside Facebook, noted that Schroepfer was likely courted to Facebook by Mozilla co-founders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, who joined Facebook when it acquired their start-up Parakey last year. The pair founded Parakey in 2006 to bridge the gap between information on the Web and the desktop with what they describe as a Web operating system that emulates a traditional OS.

"Facebook continues to grow out its engineering team, and is investing heavily in building a top notch infrastructure - it went so far as to take out a [US]$100 million loan to buy thousands more servers earlier this year," Smith noted.

Schroepfer will report directly to Zuckerberg until the company hires a vice president of engineering.

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