Snapchat’s star engineer leaves after just six months in the job
Snapchat’s high profile VP of engineering, Peter Magnusson, has abruptly quit the messaging app just six months after being poached from Google in unclear circumstances.
Magnusson rose to prominence as head of Google’s app engine, a cloud based platform which coincidentally also serves Snapchat and joined the start-up as part of a flurry of similar appointments around February; including former Amazon engineering director Timothy Sehn and ex-Facebook exec Emily White.
At Snapchat Magnusson saw his role as a long-term one, initially stating his intent to: “over time develop more infrastructure ourselves, in particular in specialized areas of our apps.”
Despite some controversy on the matter stemming from an erroneous Wall Street Journal article Snapchat has stated it remains committed to utilising the Google app engine and will not develop proprietary infrastructure at this time.
In a statement to this effect Snapchat said it remains ‘really happy with our Google infrastructure.’