Jay Parikh announces departure from Facebook

Jay Parikh had joined Facebook is 2009 and until recently was the Vice President of Engineering at the social media giant.

When Jay Parikh first joined Facebook, the entire engineering team used to sit in one building, all on the same floor. They used off-the-shelf servers and rented data centre space. His team used to provide support to the few hundred million people who were using the website back then.

"I don’t think any of us could have imagined that we would now be supporting a global community of almost 3 billion people using our family of apps mostly on mobile phones," Parikh wrote in a heartfelt note on Facebook. Reflecting on his experience, he says, "We had to continually rethink and rebuild every part of our technology stack to keep up with the growth and breakneck speech of new feature development."

He further expresses his gratitude towards his team of engineers at Facebook who come together to make the system work and serve the Facebook community. The entire system, including the infrastructure as well as the software systems, was built by the team, he says, giving his readers a glimpse of his experience at Facebook in a romanticised manner.

Also Read: Facebook announces Avinash Pant as Marketing Head for India

Parikh doesn't have any immediate plans, he would be focussing on the transition for the next few months. "I’m excited to spend time rediscovering what else is happening across our industry and to meet up with many new people. This has truly been an extraordinary adventure. I will miss this very special place," he concludes.

In a comment on Parikh's post, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote, "A lot of what we’ve achieved over the past eleven years just wouldn’t have been possible without you. I don’t think we even had a data centre when you joined, and now we share our designs so the rest of the world can catch up!"

"I think the most important thing you built here though was our culture -- not just around technical excellence in infra and eng, but for the company as a whole. It’s been wonderful watching you grow as a leader and I'm looking forward to seeing what problems you go solve next. Thanks for everything," Zuckerberg added.