Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer to Step Down in 2022 After 13 Years With Company

The exec, who led artificial intelligence efforts, plans to transition into a senior fellow

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Longtime Facebook executive Mike Schroepfer said on Wednesday he will leave his role as chief technology officer after 13 years at the company. He will step down in 2022 and transition into a senior fellow position to focus on work outside of Facebook.

Schroepfer had been leading Facebook’s artificial intelligence efforts and other tech initiatives at the tech giant. He said in on his Facebook page that he will be spending more time with family and philanthropic activities while continuing to recruit and develop talent at Facebook.

“My new role as Senior Fellow will enable me to stay deeply connected to the company, working on key initiatives including recruiting and developing technical talent and fostering our AI investments in critical technologies like @PyTorch,” he wrote on Twitter.

Andrew Bosworth, current VP of Facebook Reality Labs, will take over as CTO. Bosworth has worked on Facebook’s AR, VR and Portal products. Schroepfer said in his tweets that he is “incredibly optimistic” about the future of AI and AR/VR products. He will continue to support those efforts in his new role.

Schroepfer’s departure comes days after the company has been exposed by a series of leaks to the Wall Street Journal revealing that it had research confirming the harmful effects of its services. Findings illuminated how the platform impacted teenage mental health for girls, promoted anti-vaccination messages, and created a whitelisting program that exempted millions of high-profile users from its enforcement policies.

Schroepfer is a graduate of Stanford University and previously worked as vice president of engineering at Mozilla Corporation, where he led the product development for Firefox. He was also an engineer at Sun Microsystems, which acquired his software company CenterRun in 2003.

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