LinkedIn, which runs a Web site for professional networking, named former Google director of global operations Lloyd Taylor as its vice president of technical operations, a newly created position.
Taylor, 49, will be responsible for LinkedIn’s information technology infrastructure, business continuity and user experience. Jean-Luc Vaillant, LinkedIn’s chief technology officer, had been handling those tasks in addition to overseeing software operations, but the company said its growth necessitated bringing in additional management. Both Taylor and Vaillant will report to LinkedIn Chief Executive Dan Nye.
A big part of Taylor’s job will be making sure LinkedIn’s systems can scale with its growth. The social network has 14 million members and says it’s adding a million members a month. LinkedIn runs on a Sun Solaris platform and uses Oracle and mySQL databases. The privately held Mountain View, California-based company builds its own applications using Java.
Scalability is a challenge Taylor is familiar with. He was responsible for ensuring that Google’s massive server operations were able to keep pace with the search giant’s growth. In the three years Taylor was at Google, the company grew about threefold. It has reported $13.4 billion in revenue over its last four quarters.
