Snapchat, maker of an eponymous app of disappearing images favored by young mobile users, last week said that it hired Peter Magnusson, formerly engineering director at Google Inc., as senior vice president of engineering.
Magnusson is the most senior of as many as 50 engineering hires the company plans to make as it works to bolster the technology behind its app, which each day is used to send an estimated 400 million “snaps.” Those are photos or videos that can have messages attached and that are automatically erased a few seconds after a recipient opens them.
Magnusson told the Wall Street Journal that Snapchat’s engineering team would continue to use Google’s App Engine, a platform for which he was the lead engineer that allows developers to build and run applications, as well as other programs as it continues building out the app’s infrastructure.
The hiring comes as the Venice company has beefed up its senior ranks in recent months with personnel from larger tech companies. It hired Emily White away from her role as director of business operations at Facebook Inc.’s Instagram unit to serve as chief operating officer in December. That followed the September hire of Timothy Sehn, formerly Amazon.com’s engineering director.
Rameet Singh, L.A. regional director for recruiting firm Jobspring Partners, said Snapchat’s recent hires could result in more high-profile talent moving to Los Angeles from the Bay Area.
“For the most part, Snapchat has been successful in acquiring whoever they want. People want to go and work there,” Singh said. “I think that taking a big name like that from Google to the L.A. area just adds more fuel to Silicon Beach.”
Singh, who said top talent often heads up to the San Francisco region, said Snapchat has had little problem attracting high-quality employees who are drawn by the company’s perceived massive growth potential.
That potential has attracted investors as well. Snapchat turned down a $3 billion cash offer from Facebook late last year. It then raised $50 million from a single undisclosed investor in December, valuing the company at about $2 billion. It has raised more than $120 million in the past two years.
Its technology has had some holes poked in it, suffering a massive data breach at the end of the year that exposed 4.6 million user names and phone numbers. The company, which said the app’s picture and video messages were not compromised, belatedly apologized for the leaks and has since said it would bolster its security team.
