Twitter hires Parag Agrawal as CTO

(Reuters) – Twitter Inc appointed Parag Agrawal as Chief Technology Officer on Thursday, according to an update on the social media company’s website.

Parag Agrawal, who joined microblogging site in 2011 as an Ads Engineer, succeeds Adam Messinger who left in December 2016. In his prior role, he led Twitter’s efforts on scaling Ads systems, as well as creating and deploying a platform for online machine learning.

“In his capacity as CTO, he’s focused on scaling a cohesive machine learning and AI approach across our consumer and revenue product and infrastructure teams,” a Twitter spokesman told CNBC. The report also says Agrawal’s appointment was announced internally in October.

Before Twitter, Agrawal has had stints at Microsoft Research, Yahoo Research, and AT&T Labs.

Twitter did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.