San Francisco - Twitter said Christopher Fry stepped down as the microblogging service’s head of engineering, shifting to an advisory role.
Alexander Roetter, who was a Twitter vice president, will replace Fry, who had been senior vice president of engineering, the company said yesterday in a regulatory filing.
Roetter, who formerly worked at Google, joined Twitter in 2010 and most recently headed the advertising-engineering team.
Twitter, based in San Francisco, is looking to speed up the release of new tools and features that will encourage users to spend more time on its social-media site.
Chief executive Dick Costolo, who is facing pressure to reverse a slowdown in member growth, has said the company is depending on its product strategy to help broaden the service’s appeal.
Fry’s departure is the latest executive shuffle at Twitter, which saw its vice president for consumer product, Michael Sippey, leave in January.
He was succeeded by Google maps executive Daniel Graf.
In August, before Twitter’s initial public offering, General Counsel Alexander Macgillivray left and was replaced by an internal candidate, Vijaya Gadde.
Fry had been Twitter’s top engineer since March 2013, after joining the company in 2012.
He was among Twitter’s highest-paid executives, bringing in $10.3 million in total compensation in 2012, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Twitter shares gained less than 1 percent to $34 at yesterday’s close in New York.
Though it traded as high as $74.73 after the company’s November IPO, the stock has lost 47 percent of its value this year as analysts and investors raised concerns about user growth. - Bloomberg News