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Twitter Engineering SVP Chris Fry to Depart the Company

Big moves at the top.

Troy Holden

Chris Fry, Twitter’s senior vice president of engineering, plans to step down from his executive role at the company, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday afternoon.

Fry will move into an advisory role, according to the filings. Alex Roetter, Twitter’s vice president of revenue engineering, will step into Fry’s role, overseeing all of Twitter’s engineering organization.

Fry’s departure marks another in a string of executive shuffles over the past year. Former Consumer Product VP Michael Sippey left Twitter in January of this year, while former General Counsel Alexander Macgillivray departed in August of 2013, just months before Twitter made its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange.

Twitter has positioned many — but not all — of these moves as transitions into advisory roles. Ruslan Belkin, for instance, said he would become an adviser after leading Twitter’s search and relevance team for two-plus years.

Multiple company insiders, however, have said that some of these “advisory roles” are mostly for external appearances. Twitter’s top brass is cleaning house, sources said, replacing some managers with more efficient leaders inside and outside of the company.

For example: As I wrote in a piece last year, Twitter’s product organization had traditionally moved sluggishly in shipping new features out the door, something that often incurred the ire of many others inside the company.

CEO Dick Costolo, too, has grown less willing to tolerate a slow pace of innovation, having said as much publicly at the inaugural Code Conference earlier this week.

Thus, I’d expect more changes and departures to come in the weeks ahead, according to rumblings I’ve heard from sources familiar with the matter.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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