Snapchat Recruits Senior Google Engineer In Development Drive

Messaging app service Snapchat has announcedthat Kevin Magnusson, the former head of Google’s App Engine team, will be joining the company as its new vice president of engineering.

Snapchat Co-founder Bobby Murphy confirmed the appointment, with the instant photo messaging application looking to greatly expand it developer team, with as many as 50 new hires in the pipeline.

Magnusson apparently first noticed Snapchat as one of the App Engine’s largest customers whilst at Google, which also currently provides the data centres which facilitate the app’s sharing ability.

“The whole IT industry — going back to the ‘80s or ‘90s – everything is stored and saved and archived,” Magnusson told the Wall Street Journal. “Snapchat is revisiting it and saying, hey, for person to person communication, we don’t want any of that.”

Expanding team

Magnusson’s appointment is the latest in a series of high-profile hires for Snapchat. The company also boasts Timothy Sehn, a former engineering director at Amazon, who joined last September, as well as former Facebook executive Emily White, who left the social networking company to become Snapchat’s chief operating officer in December.

Snapchat was one of the runaway technology success stories of 2013, enjoying massive growth as its popularity exploded. The service, which allows the temporary sharing of images amongst contacts, turned down a reported $3bn takeover deal from Facebook last year, and has many other major suitors in the industry.

Magnusson’s role at the company will see Snapchat looking to develop its own cloud infrastructure, as well as improving its security provisions. The app suffered a major data breach in December that saw the usernames and phone numbers of millions of its members stolen and posted online after the company failed to patch a hole in its software.

Following this leak, the company said it had “implemented various safeguards” to prevent any further attacks, with Murphy stating that building a security team “will be a major priority for the company”.

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