Social media giant Meta’s transitional phase after the departure of long-time COO Sheryl Sandberg continues. The company have officially stated that Santosh Janardhan will be taking over their engineering department after the current head, David Mortenson, handed in his two-weeks notice.
The news was initially made known to all members of the company via a memo that was later obtained by The Verge. In the memo, Mortenson expressed his pride towards all the achievements he accomplished alongside his team.
“I’m incredibly proud of everything we’ve achieved over the past two years I’ve been supporting Infra,” says Mortenson, going on to add that Meta “survived the biggest capacity crunch in the company’s history (at least in the past decade)” and “managed to stay productive as we shifted to work from home.”
Mortensen had been working at Meta for 11 years through various roles. His current responsibilities included being in charge of the company’s data centres and overall infrastructure. According to Facebook’s official website, “he supports the teams responsible for developing and operating the hardware, network, software and data centres that all Meta services run on.”
The position will be filled internally, with former vice president of engineering and infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, taking the reins from Mortensen. Janardhan himself is a highly experienced member of the team and has been working for Meta for over 12 years.
Mortensen’s resignation is the latest in a series of high profile departures from Meta. Recently, Sheryl Sandberg said she would be leaving the company after 14 years of working with them, while one day later, Meta’s vice-president of artificial intelligence, Jerome Pesenti also announced his resignation.
It is being speculated that this intense transitional shift on a leadership level is a direct result of Meta’s poor figures in their recent financial report which forced the company to put on hold many of their plans regarding future technologies such as VR/AR and the metaverse.
