By Sheila Dang
(Reuters) – Snap Inc said on Monday it hired a new senior vice president of engineering from Google, the latest in a string of new recruits to advance its advertising business.
Eric Young, who was previously vice president of engineering for Alphabet Inc’s Google Cloud, will oversee the core infrastructure for Snap, which owns the popular photo messaging app Snapchat.
He will also lead efforts to improve Snap’s ability to target and measure ads on Snapchat, which was made more difficult by privacy updates on Apple’s iOS devices.
While Snap has consistently expanded its audience for Snapchat, which now has 750 million monthly users, the company has struggled to generate revenue at the same pace.
In April, Snap said it was taking steps to simplify how users interact with ads and improve the relevance of ads shown to users, which it said hurt results for some advertisers in the short term.
While at Google, Young worked on building the tech infrastructure for products like search, ads and YouTube.
His appointment at Snap comes after the company hired Rob Wilk, former head of advertising at Microsoft Corp, to become president of the Americas region, as well as another Google executive to lead revenue product.
(Reporting by Sheila Dang in Dallas; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
