Who is Santosh Janardhan? What's ahead for Meta after departure of long-time infrastructure head in 2027?
Santosh Janardhan, Meta Platform's long-time head of infrastructure and co-head of engineering, will leave the tech giant in early 2027, the company informed employees in a staff memo on Wednesday, Bloomberg reported.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in an internal post to employees, thanked Janardhan for his contributions, according to the report. “You’ve positioned the team and Meta well for this moment, and you’ve built a strong team that can carry this work forward,” he stated.
The memo did not specify the reason for Janardhan's departure but said he will stay at the company for the first quarter next year to support the transition to the current vice president of infrastructure, Dave Brown.
Brown joined Meta earlier this year after close to 20 years at Amazon Web Services (AWS), it added.
The development is a major leadership change at Meta as it continues to invest billions in artificial intelligence (AI) and data centres. Janardhan couldn’t immediately be reached for comment, according to the report.
Santosh Janardhan has been at Meta since its Facebook days, having joined in 2009. He played a critical role in building the software, hardware, networks and data centres that helped scale the social media platform into a $1.7 trillion tech major, the report noted.
Post the shift to AI, he also took over additional charge as co-lead of Meta Compute, aimed at developing a long-term strategy for obtaining, managing and allocating computing capacity needed to support its aggressive AI bets. Leadership for this new initiative includes Meta’s vice chairman and president Dina Powell McCormick and vice president of product Daniel Gross, it added.
Before Meta, Janardhan led data and storage teams at YouTube, Google and PayPal, as per his leadership profile on the company website. He holds a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Sardar Patel University and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, it added.
In his memo to employees, Janardhan spoke about his first day at Facebook in October 2009 and “not quite knowing what to expect”. He shared being “pulled out and asked to help on the udb7766 sev. We were adding a million users/day, the site was barely keeping up, we weren’t quite profitable but the energy and the talent was palpable – you could feel it. What followed has been the journey of a lifetime.”
He added that over 17 years, his department's infrastructure has grown in scale, complexity, and importance, “way more than I could have imagined”, and that over time “Infrastructure grew from an enabling function into a strategic advantage for Meta”.
Janardhan also expressed pride in his work with Meta, calling it “an honour and the privilege of my career” and outlined the tech giant's likely future path.
“I am making this decision with tremendous pride in what we have built and real confidence in where Infra is headed. "The next phase is about turning the scale and technical depth we have built into greater speed for our product teams and a lasting advantage for Meta. As we make the next set of choices about our priorities, this is the right time for Dave to take the lead in shaping that work.”
(With inputs from Bloomberg)
Jocelyn Fernandes is a journalist and editor with nearly 13 years of experience covering the business, corporate, economy and markets beats in news.<br> As chief content producer for around three years at Livemint (Hindustan Times), Jocelyn publishes breaking stories, explainers, features and live blogs on a range of business and economy topics, including the Budget, corporate developments, stock markets, income tax, money and personal finance, cryptocurrency, government policy, impact of US tariffs, international developments and more.<br> Jocelyn's writing philosophy is focused on delivering news in an accurate and accessible format for readers. She thus focuses her news coverage on explainers and FAQs in order to breakdown business, corporate, economic, and policy topics that are of importance to everyday readers.<br> She holds a Bachelors in Mass Media (BMM) and Post Graduate Diploma (PGD) in Journalism and Communication and has previously written for online business and markets news site Moneycontrol (Network18), Business-to-business (B2B) trade publications — the industry magazines Power Today and Solar Today (ASAPP Media), and the national news agency United News of India (UNI).<br> Outside of work, Jocelyn keeps up-to-date with local and international news, enjoys reading fiction books, novels and short stories, and enjoys movies, travelling and art. <br> She can be found on X and LinkedIn, and reached by email: <a href="jocelyn.fernandes@htdigital.in">jocelyn.fernandes@htdigital.in</a> <br> X/ Twitter handle: <a href="https://x.com/scribeJocelyn">@scribeJocelyn</a> <br> LinkedIn: <a href="https://in.linkedin.com/in/jocelyn-fernandes-journalist">LinkedIn</a>
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