Zynga Snags Analyst to Be VP of Finance

After a string of high-level departures in 2012, it looks like Zynga is firming up its executive ranks.

The gaming company looks to have snapped up Atul Bagga, an analyst formerly of Lazard Capital Markets, to be the new VP of finance at Zynga, according to a recent change in Bagga’s LinkedIn profile.

Bagga will report to Mark Vranesh, who was appointed Zynga’s chief financial officer back in November of 2012, when former CFO Dave Wehner left the company to join Facebook.

Bagga seems a pretty natural fit at Zynga. He covered video games and Internet companies during his time at Lazard, and has been working as an analyst covering games, media and the digital space for close to 20 years. He has also got a finance background, with stints spent at ThinkEquity and brokerage firm Smith New Court (now a part of Merrill Lynch).

Bagga is a graduate of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and also holds advanced degrees from the University of Bombay and the National Institute of Technology in Allahabad, India.

Zynga confirmed to AllThingsD that Bagga joined the company.

The hire is one in a string of important appointments for Zynga, which continues to re-staff key positions after its series of executive defections at the end of 2012 and beginning of this year. In a high-level restructuring at the end of 2012, David Ko slid into the COO position while Barry Cottle became Zynga’s chief revenue officer. The company continues to trumpet its heavy focus on mobile going forward, attempting to diversify its game offerings outside of the Facebook platform.

It’s worth noting that apparently not all the departures have been stymied quite yet. Zynga CIO Debra Chrapaty announced Monday she would be leaving the gaming company to become CEO of Nirvanix, an enterprise cloud storage company.

Shares of Zynga were up 1.5 percent after regular trading on Monday afternoon at $3.46 per share.