Snapchat Hires Former Google Engineer

Snapchat, the popular disappearing-messages service that suffered some big bumps in the road over the last few months, has hired former Google engineer Peter Magnusson, The Wall Street Journal reports. This is the latest in a spat of relatively recent hires, and hints at the company's efforts to increase its worker numbers and improve its service.

Before joining Snapchat, Magnusson worked as an engineering director for Google — as such, it isn't surprising his new title at Snapchat is Vice President of Engineering. The information was provided by co-founder Bobby Murphy in a recent interview, and is the latest in what could amount to 50 new hires for the 15-person Snapchat developers team.

Snapchat, which has previously received a $3 billion offer from Facebook, has seen rapid growth since its launch, and boasts processing hundreds of millions of messages every day — by November, the company had revealed, it was processing in excess of 400 million messages per day, a doubling from its June numbers in the same year.

As mentioned, Magnusson is the latest in what has been several hires, and the still-young company has attracted new employees from other big-name companies, including Facebook and Amazon. For Magnusson's part, he said Snapchat's fast growth caught his eye whilst he oversaw Google's App Engine.

Co-founder and CTO Murphy said during the interview that putting together a security team "will be a major priority for the company," something that isn't surprising given the recent issues it has had with spam and vulnerabilities. Check out the timeline below for other recent Snapchat news.

SOURCE: Wall Street Journal