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Square Shuffles Executive Roles as Product Portfolio Grows

Engineering leaders Gokul Rajaram and Alyssa Henry take on new responsibilities.

Square
Jason Del Rey
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.

Local commerce company Square shuffled some chairs in its executive suite recently, creating a clean split in responsibilities between its two top engineering execs, according to multiple sources.

Gokul Rajaram has moved into a role running engineering and product teams for Square’s consumer products: The restaurant-delivery service Caviar, which recently released its first app, as well as the new food-ordering app, Square Order. Rajaram previously oversaw Square’s software for merchants, with a focus on its core checkout software, Square Register.

Engineering lead Alyssa Henry will now oversee all product and engineering teams working on software Square makes for business owners, including Square Register. She had originally been focused solely on the back end of Square’s payment system and infrastructure, as well as fraud and analytics teams. Square hired Henry away from Amazon in April, where she was an executive on the company’s AWS cloud computing business.

Both execs continue to report to CEO Jack Dorsey. A Square spokesman declined to comment.

The role change comes at an important time as Square expands its product portfolio to a dozen offerings and looks to create higher-margin software businesses to complement its core payments acceptance service. With the move, it appears Square is attempting to bring better organization to its executive structure, with clear delineations between divisions focused on products mainly geared toward consumers and ones that target business owners. It doesn’t appear that anyone lost their job in the shake-up.

The one software product that remains an outlier is Square Cash, the money-transfer service, which is not run by either Rajaram or Henry. The reason isn’t clear.

In other executive news at Square, the company this week announced the hire of Visa Chief Marketing Officer Kevin Burke. He is taking the role of head of customer acquisition.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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