Peter Magnusson is Snapchat's new exec and he has big plans for the company

Feb 19, 2014 10:40 GMT  ·  By

Snapchat hasn’t had the best of luck in the past few months, with a huge security breach taking place just recently. The company is working its way back to tip-top shape, however, and seems to hope that hiring Peter Magnusson will help.

Magnusson is a former engineering director at Google and he’s now joined Snapchat as the vice president of engineering, Bobby Murphy, Snapchat co-founder said, Wall Street Journal reports.

Snapchat has been on a path of hiring more people, specifically looking for engineers. The startup is reportedly looking into hiring about 50 new people this year to add to the rather small team it currently has.

The company’s desire to expand is understandable, especially considering the wild success of the app it developed and the fact that it attracted a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook.

Magnusson is quite thrilled about the career move he has made. He had noticed the company’s growth while he was handling Google’s App Engine. “Snapchat runs primarily on Google data centers,” he said about the new company he joined.

As far as future plans go, Magnusson says that Snapchat will continue building the infrastructure to support the app’s unique needs. They plan to leverage as much of what Google and other service providers offer as possible to achieve this goal, he said. And, after all, Magnusson certainly knows what Google has to offer and how best to take advantage of this.

“The whole IT industry — going back to the ‘80s or ‘90s – everything is stored and saved and archived. Snapchat is revisiting it and saying, hey, for person to person communication, we don’t want any of that,” Magnusson said.

Given the security breach that put millions of Snapchat users under the spotlight, this is also an area that the company wants to focus on in the coming months.