Social bulletin board Pinterest is on a roll: After raising a massive $200 million round less than a month ago, it just snagged itself two seasoned veterans to beef up its search and discovery department. Michael Lopp, a former director at Palentir and Apple veteran, is joining as the head of engineering. Bob Baxley, the former director of design for Apple’s online store, is joining as the head of product design and research. Lopp and Baxley actually worked together on certain projects at Apple, including the online store. “As we build a visual discovery engine, we’re thrilled to announce the addition of two industry leaders to the growing Pinterest team. As Head of Engineering, Michael Lopp will lead the technical team behind Pinterest focused on product development and scaling an infrastructure with 30B+ Pins,” the company said in an official statement.
Pinterest is pinning its vision for the future on a couple of Apple employees with ecommerce backgrounds. The social bookmarking service announced Tuesday that it has hired Bob Baxley, a longtime design director at Apple, and Michael Lopp, who worked at Apple for nine years before moving on to Palantir Technologies in 2010. Baxley will take over as Pinterest’s head of product design and Lopp will be the company’s head of engineering. Baxley joined Apple in 2006 from Yahoo and helped spearhead the effort to bring Apple’s online store up to modern web standards and later led the design of the Apple Store app. While at Apple, Lopp led part of the engineering team that worked on the Mac OS X Server, before leading engineering efforts for the online store. “As we build a visual discovery engine, we’re thrilled to announce the addition of two industry leaders to the growing Pinterest team,” Pinterest said in a statement. Lopp will be responsible for scaling Pinterest’s infrastructure. Baxley will be “charged with creating the interface and experience that helps tens of millions of Pinners save and discover the things they love.”
