Google is continuing to bleed high-level executives and, this time, it is Google China's turn. The Internet giant has announced that the company's Head of Operations in the country, Kai-Fu Lee, will resign from his position to pursue other interests. Two executives in the company will take over Lee's roles, Boon-Lock Yeo, who is now working as director of Google’s Shanghai engineering office, will take over the engineering department, and John Liu, VP of sales and operations, will assume the business and operations side.

“Kai-Fu has made an enormous contribution to Google over the last four years — helping dramatically to improve the quality and range of services that we offer in China and ensuring that we continue to innovate on the Web for the benefit of users and advertisers,” Alan Eustace, senior VP of engineering, says in a statement.

Lee joined Google in 2005, after leaving Microsoft's operations in the country. This prompted Microsoft to file a suit against Lee and Google for allegedly breaching a one-year agreement that prevented him to work for a competitor. Google then filed a countersuit in a Californian court. The two companies settled in December 2005, without disclosing the terms of the agreement.

At Google China, Lee worked to establish the company in the market and has seen it grow at a very healthy pace for the past years. He was also responsible for launching the Google.cn website, the search engine's regional version, while also strengthening the company's team of engineers and scientists in the country. Still, Google is far behind the country's number-one search engine, Baidu, and has also been criticized for complying with the government's censorship requests.

“With a very strong leadership team in place, it seemed a very good moment for me to move to the next chapter in my career,” Lee shares in a statement. He will go on to start his own company in an unspecified field.