Facebook Engineering Boss Parikh Exits, but Open Networking Lives On

Under Jay Parikh's ten-year leadership, Facebook built one of the most sophisticated data and networking infrastructures in the world, and collaborated with telcos on open networking.

Mitch Wagner, Executive Editor, Light Reading

January 29, 2020

2 Min Read
Facebook Engineering Boss Parikh Exits, but Open Networking Lives On

Despite the departure of its VP of engineering, Jay Parikh, Facebook plans to continue moving forward with telco collaborations, open networking and connectivity initiatives launched during his tenure.

Parikh announced his departure on his Facebook page Tuesday. He will stay on at Facebook for several months, and has no immediate plans beyond the company.

Parikh had a broad remit, which will be filled by several people, according to a company spokesperson.

Figure 1: Jay Parikh talking to Light Reading at MWC 2018. Jay Parikh talking to Light Reading at MWC 2018.

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He joined the company ten years ago, overseeing infrastructure to support its rapid growth. When Parikh joined, "our entire engineering team sat in one building all on one floor, and we were buying off-the-shelf servers and renting data center space. We supported a few hundred million people mostly using the facebook.com website. I don't think any of us could have imagined that we would now be supporting a global community of almost 3 billion people using our family of apps mostly on mobile phones," he said.

Now, Facebook designs and builds its own infrastructure, "from the data center buildings, to the cooling systems, to the internal electrical distribution, to the different types of servers, to the network switches, to the subsea cables, and many other infrastructure components," Parikh said. He oversaw all of that.

Infrastructure design and construction is where Facebook has often collaborated with telcos, most notably through the Telecom Infrastructure Project (TIP) and Open Networking User Group (ONUG) initiatives and on the development of open source networking equipment, servers and even data center racks.

After Parikh's departure, Facebook infrastructure will be led by David Mortenson, VP of engineering, Yael Maguire, director of engineering, and Dan Rabinovitsj, connectivity group VP, who will continue their work on connectivity, including working with telcos.

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About the Author

Mitch Wagner

Executive Editor, Light Reading

San Diego-based Mitch Wagner is many things. As well as being "our guy" on the West Coast (of the US, not Scotland, or anywhere else with indifferent meteorological conditions), he's a husband (to his wife), dissatisfied Democrat, American (so he could be President some day), nonobservant Jew, and science fiction fan. Not necessarily in that order.

He's also one half of a special duo, along with Minnie, who is the co-habitor of the West Coast Bureau and Light Reading's primary chewer of sticks, though she is not the only one on the team who regularly munches on bark.

Wagner, whose previous positions include Editor-in-Chief at Internet Evolution and Executive Editor at InformationWeek, will be responsible for tracking and reporting on developments in Silicon Valley and other US West Coast hotspots of communications technology innovation.

Beats: Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP networking, and colored foods (such as 'green rice').

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