Microblogging platform Twitter announced Friday, March 9, the appointment of Indian-American engineer Parag Agrawal as the new chief technical officer (CTO) of the global organization.
Agrawal took charge as the CTO of Twitter after Adam Messinger, who left the organization in late 2016.
Although the Indian-American techie had taken over the role as CTO within the organization in October 2017, the public announcement was made Friday.
An alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and a doctorate from Standford University, Agrawal has been described in his official Bio on Twitter as "leading technical strategy for the company and overseeing machine learning and AI across our product and infrastructure teams."
The announcement made on the website said that the young software engineer would be spearheading the technical strategies of the global organization.
"Parag has played an integral role in our technical strategy throughout his tenure at Twitter, including spearheading our efforts to make the Home timeline more relevant using machine learning and incorporating a more rigorous approach to data analysis in product development," a Twitter spokesperson was quoted by PTI as saying.
Congratulations Parag Agrawal ?? ( IIT Bombay alumnus) for his appointment as CTO of @TwitterIndia @Twitter @iitbombay #ParagAgrawal
— Rajkumar Jagdale (@RajkumarJagdale) March 10, 2018
@paraga #CTOTwitter #Indian pic.twitter.com/3KpTW5yFH0
Agrawal had earlier interned with AT&T, Microsoft and Yahoo before he joined Twitter in October 2011 as an Ads engineer.
"In his capacity as CTO, he's focused on scaling a cohesive machine learning and AI approach across our consumer and revenue product and infrastructure teams," a Twitter spokesman told CNBC.
The contributions of Agrawal — who started out as an Ads Engineer — to Twitter include increasing the relevance of tweets for users using Artificial Intelligence that prevented abuse on the social networking site, CNBC reported.
Twitter had been without CTO in the past as well as the first CTO of the company, Greg Pass, joined Twitter in 2008 but later left the organization in 2011. Messinger had joined Twitter in November 2011 but was appointed CTO two years later.
