Facebook promotes Mike Schroepfer to CTO

Schroepfer has served the company's VP of engineering for the last five years

Ever since Facebook Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor announced that he was departing the company in June of last year to found his own start up, the social network has gone the entire time without a appointing a new CTO. That is, until now.

Facebook has finally decided to fill the vacancy, promoting Mike Schroepfer, the company's vice president of engineering, into the role, it was confirmed to AllThingsD on Friday. 

“Mike Schroepfer’s new designation as Facebook’s CTO reflects the unique and important role he plays across the company,” Facebook is reported to have said in a statement.

Vator has reached out to Facebook to confirm the news independently. We are also trying to find out when Schroepfer is expected to begin serving as CTO, and we will update when we hear more. 

According to his LinkedIn profile, Schroepfer has been working at Facebook as VP of engineering for a little less than five years, starting the job in August of 2008. Prior to that, he held the same role at Mozilla for over three years, from July 2005 to August 2008, where he led the the product development process behind Mozilla’s popular software, including the Firefox web browser.

He was also an engineer at Sun Microsystems for a little less than a year, from November 2003 to October 2004. Schroepfer has also been a member of the board of trustees at the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology since November 2011, and was member of the board of directors at Ancestry.com from February 2011 to December 2012.

Former CTO Bret Taylor left Facebook last summer  to be start a company with Google engineer Kevin Gibbs. That company has manifested itself into something called Quip.com, but the exact nature of what the service does still remains unknown. Taylor had been the CEO of FriendFeed, which was purchased  by the social network in August 2009 for $50 million. He was then appointed as CTO of Facebook, where he served for nearly two years. 

Facebook shares dropped 1.46%, or 40 cents, in Friday trading to $26.65. In January the company hit the $30 mark for the first time in six months, but the stock has been trading under $30 since the end of January, when it released its fourth quarter numbers, which were actually better than expected.

(Image source: https://www.smh.com)