One of Twitter’s longest-tenured engineering leads, Utkarsh Srivastava, is departing for Google.
Longtime Twitter Engineer Utkarsh Srivastava, Who Helped Build Twitter’s Ads Business, Departs for Google
Srivastava was key in getting Twitter’s ad products off the ground, sources say.
Kurt Wagner
Srivastava, who joined Twitter in 2009, was most recently a senior director of engineering at Twitter where he oversaw the engineering team for Twitter’s main timeline. Before that, though, Srivastava was the lead engineer for Twitter’s revenue products under Senior Engineering VP Alex Roetter. Numerous sources tell Re/code that Srivastava was a key player in getting the company’s ad products off the ground, and that his departure is an important one for Twitter’s engineering team.
Srivastava announced his own departure in a tweet on Wednesday:
https://twitter.com/utkarsh/status/672196338558218240
Google declined to comment on what Srivastava will do at the search giant. But Srivastava said on Twitter that he would be “building products for messaging / communications.” That would likely place him under Google’s nebulous Communications division, where Hangouts and its Project Fi wireless network sit, under longtime Googler and former ads exec Nick Fox.
Movement like this is not uncommon for longtime executives like Srivastava. Six years is an eternity in Silicon Valley. It does, however, come at an important time for Twitter in that new CEO Jack Dorsey is still restructuring teams internally, including the engineering team, which was hit hard during the company’s recent round of layoffs in October. Srivastava was considered a candidate to run engineering for the core Twitter app alongside new product lead Jeff Seibert, according to sources. The departure of top engineers, regardless of the reason, adds wrinkles to those restructuring plans.
Additional reporting by Mark Bergen.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
