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YouTube Gets a New Tech Boss, From Google

Venkat Panchapakesan is the new head of engineering at the biggest video site in the world.

Peter Kafka
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.

YouTube has a new top techie: Venkat Panchapakesan is the video site’s new head of engineering.

Panchapakesan had previously headed up engineering at Google’s Apps group. He fills part of a hole created this spring, when YouTube executive Shishir Mehrotra, who had overseen product and engineering, moved on. Panchapakesan will report to YouTube boss Susan Wojcicki, who took control of the site in February.

YouTube confirmed the move, but declined to comment further. Still, it’s reasonable to assume that we might see more of these in the coming months, as Wojcicki figures out what she wants to change at the world’s biggest video site.

Prior to joining Google in 2010, Panchapakesan had been an entrepreneur in residence at Greylock Partners, and before that he had spent more than a decade at Yahoo, eventually running its audience technology group.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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