Facebook’s Engineering Director David Recordon is trading his life in Silicon Valley for a job at the White House.
The Obama administration on Thursday named Recordon as the Director of White House Information Technology, a new position created to make the White House’s technology more modern, efficient and secure.
“In our continued efforts to serve our citizens better, we’re bringing in top tech leaders to support our teams across the federal government…,” President Barack Obama said in a statement. “(Recordon’s) considerable private sector experience and ability to deploy the latest collaborative and communication technologies will be a great asset to our work on behalf of the American people.”
Recordon started working for Facebook in 2009, according to his LinkedIn and Facebook profile.
Last year, the Obama administration brought together a team of engineers, designers, and product managers to help make government services easier to access online. Recordon has been a part of that team and even posted about some of his Washington D.C. visits on his Facebook page.
“Now don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of absolutely serious companies who truly impact lives on a daily basis but the United States government serves all of us in ways the venture capital fueled valley does not,” he wrote in a Facebook post in August 2014. “It lets people afford quality healthcare, it lets people afford college, it (sometimes) lets people immigrate, it helps small business grow, and provides many other social services not just for some but for all Americans.”
At Facebook, Recordon oversaw teams responsible for open source, engineering education, and the technology behind the company’s human resources, video conferencing, and physical security efforts, according to the White House.
He attended the University of Rochester’s Institute of Technology, studying criminal justice and information technology from 2004 to 2006. But he dropped out to work as an engineer for start-ups including VeriSign and Six Apart.
He’s not the only Silicon Valley tech expert that Obama has recently hired. In February, the White House tapped DJ Patil, formerly of LinkedIn, RelateIQ, Skype, PayPal, eBay, Greylock and other Silicon Valley tech firms, as its first chief data scientist and deputy chief technology officer.
Photo Credit: KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images
