(Reuters) – Mike Schroepfer, a longtime Facebook executive, said on Wednesday he was stepping down as the company’s chief technology officer.
Schroepfer said in a Facebook post that veteran leader Andrew Bosworth, who leads the social media company’s augmented reality and virtual reality efforts, including products like its Oculus Quest VR headphones, will take on the role in 2022.
Schroepfer, known as “Schrep” and who spent 13 years on Facebook, said he would move on to a part-time role as the company’s first senior fellow next year.
Bosworth, or “Boz,” created Facebook’s AR / VR organization, which was renamed Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) in 2020.
“As the next CTO, Boz will continue to lead Facebook Reality Labs and oversee our work in augmented reality, virtual reality and more, and as part of this transition, some other groups will also join Boz’s team.” , said CEO Mark Zuckerberg. message to employees that was posted on the Facebook blog.
“All of this is critical to our broader efforts to help build the metaverse, and I’m excited about the future of this work under Boz’s leadership,” he said, referring to Silicon Valley’s idea of shared spaces. which fuse the digital and the physical world. and can be accessed through different devices.
Facebook is under pressure from global regulators, lawmakers and civil society groups who have criticized it for abusing its platform, such as extremism and misinformation, and want it to improve on a number of issues, such as transparency. content moderation and recommendation systems and their approaches. to the privacy and security of users.
The company has been pushing its role in creating an embodied Internet, or “metaverse,” which Zuckerberg bets will be the next big computer platform.
In July, the company said it was creating a new product team to work on those ambitions, as part of Facebook Reality Labs.
Zuckerberg said Schroepfer’s new role would include helping the company recruit and develop technical talent and encourage investment in artificial intelligence.
Other central leaders who have left the company in recent months are the head of Facebook’s main application, Fiji Simo, who left to become CEO of Instacart, and the head of global advertising Carolyn Everson, who she was hired as president of the start-up.
(Report by Elizabeth Culliford in London and Chavi Mehta in Bengaluru; Edited by Anil D’Silva and Sonya Hepinstall)