One of Instagram’s top executives is taking over one of Facebook’s biggest jobs: Instagram COO Marne Levine is moving to Facebook as VP of global partnerships and business development, a job recently vacated by longtime executive Dan Rose.
Instagram COO Marne Levine is headed back to Facebook to become one of its top executives
Levine is taking over all of Facebook’s global partnerships.
The new job means Levine, who moved from Facebook to Instagram almost four years ago, will lead all global partnerships at Facebook. That’s everything from media and entertainment relationships to deals with payments processors and record labels to deals with mobile operators like Apple and Google. The only part of Rose’s job she won’t oversee is corporate development — the mergers and acquisitions team — which is going to another executive, global operations VP Justin Osofsky.
Levine and Osofsky will both report to COO Sheryl Sandberg.
It’s a big promotion for Levine, who will join Facebook’s management team, though her appointment isn’t a total surprise. She was a likely internal candidate for the position, as reported by Recode last month, and was a top Facebook executive running public policy at the social giant before joining Instagram. She’s also best friends with Sandberg.
“Since she began at Instagram four years ago, Marne has been an invaluable COO,” Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said in a statement shared with Recode. “We have grown from a community of 300 million to more than a billion, from a team of just over 100 to more than a thousand employees and opened offices all over the world. There are few executives with the range and skill of Marne.”
Levine’s new role is also the latest in what has been a busy year of executive shuffling at Facebook, a place where most of the company’s leadership has worked together for a long, long time. People rarely leave Facebook, but three key executives have left in the past three months alone, including Rose, and many others took new roles. What’s tough to tell is how much impact Facebook’s 2016 election debacle and the company’s Cambridge Analytica scandal have played into these changes.
A lot of shuffling has been to bring teams that were running more independently — groups leading Instagram and WhatsApp, for example — closer to their corporate owner, Facebook. That will certainly rub some people the wrong way. WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum already left earlier this year over disagreements with Facebook management about whether or not to put ads inside the app.
Instagram says it will search both internally and externally to fill Levine’s COO job.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
