Reddit hires former Twitter ad team director as VP of ad products, engineering

Reddit announced on Wednesday it has named Shariq Rizvi as its vice president of ad products and engineering. Rizvi will lead Reddit’s monetization and ads product team, and report to CEO Steve Huffman. Most recently the co-founder and COO of Netsil, a monitoring platform for modern cloud applications, Rizvi served as Twitter’s co-founder of performance ads business and a director on its ads team from 2012 to 2016.

Why you should care

With this latest hire, Reddit is aiming to take its performance and direct response ad offerings to a new level. Rizvi’s background in ad tech and entrepreneurial initiatives show that the company is committed to further building out its ad platform to attract more advertisers to the site.

“Reddit offers a powerful solution to the human need for true community and authentic communication, which I’ve experienced first-hand. Aside from the clear value for users and advertisers, there’s also an obvious match between my knowledge, experience, skill set and what Reddit needs right now –– to scale up the online ads platform,” said Rizvi.

The company spent last year rolling out a complete redesign of its website — the first since in more than a decade — and launched new ad offerings, including native video ads, native promoted post ads and new call-to-action buttons for ads. CEO Steve Huffman commented on the company’s recent efforts to build out its ad platform in the release announcing Rizvi’s hire.

“Throughout 2018, we’ve demonstrated the value of engaging with our community — and new inventory like native mobile and native video ads in the redesign have showcased the opportunity for branded engagement. While video and engagement campaigns will always remain a focus for Reddit’s Brand Partnerships team, Shariq’s hire represents an additional investment in a more robust, performance-driven suite of advertising solutions for marketers in 2019,” said Huffman.

More about Reddit’s new VP of ad products and engineering

1. Rizvi joined Twitter in 2012 after the company acquired his web security firm Dasient — an enterprise startup that was backed by Google Ventures.

2. In addition to starting Dasient, Rizvi is also founded Netsil which was acquired by Nutanix in 2018.

3. Rizvi began his career at Google, working on products like web search, App Engine and the Google Calculator.