Early Facebook Technical Operations Director Leaves Company

Facebook Director of Operations Brian Walsh left the company last week after a 4.5 year stint. Walsh was one of the first operations hires at the company, and had helped set up its data center operations, capacity engineering and build out its technical operations and IT teams.

His group has had a remarkable track record of uptime, especially considering Facebook’s extreme growth.

Walsh was one of multiple people with the same title, but his departure is notable given his long tenure at the company and the context of other early employees leaving.

To give you a sense of how long Walsh had been at Facebook, he was hired by then-COO Owen Van Natta (who was since CEO of Project Playlist and Myspace and now helps run Zynga) in 2006.

As we understand it, Walsh does not have firm plans for what he’ll do next. Facebook declined to comment.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.