San Francisco, California (PRWEB) November 11, 2015
Imgur, the world’s largest image sharing community, today announced the expansion of its leadership team with Ron Benson, Ph.D and former Vice President of Engineering at Walmart eCommerce. As Imgur’s Vice President of Engineering, Benson will focus on building out Imgur’s data engineering and machine learning functions in addition to scaling and structuring the company’s engineering team to scale its mobile products.
Since raising $40M from Andreessen Horowitz in 2014, the Imgur team has grown in size to support the development and adoption of Imgur’s mobile apps, and Benson’s hire is part of an ongoing effort to support the growth of Imgur’s mobile engineering and unlock Imgur’s massive dataset of images and GIFs. Benson’s appointment enables CEO Alan Schaaf’s main focus to be driving the long-term vision of the business.
"As the engineer that built Imgur in the early days, it wasn't easy to find the right leader for the role,” said CEO Alan Schaaf. “Ron has co-founded three startups, and his experience as an entrepreneur makes him an excellent addition to Imgur’s leadership team. His in-depth knowledge of scaling engineering teams through growth stages is the skillset we need right now at Imgur, and we’re so excited to have him here."
At Walmart eCommerce, which provides technology that supports Walmart.com, SamsClub.com, and VUDU, Benson served as VP of Engineering with a focus on the intersection of big data, machine learning, and user experience initiatives. Additionally, Benson helped to build start-ups within the company that added over $500M in annual incremental revenue. During his three years in the role, Benson grew his engineering team from 10 to 170, proving his capabilities for scaling Imgur’s team in a similar fashion, in-line with the company’s focus on growth.
“Imgur is at an exciting inflection point. Imgur’s extensive dataset and user base has positioned the company to do innovative things with image understanding,” said Ron Benson, VP of Engineering at Imgur. “I’m looking forward to working with the company to scale the engineering team and use data to enhance the discovery experience so we are maximizing Imgur’s tremendous growth opportunity.”
Imgur is the world’s largest image sharing community with more than 150 million monthly active users. Discover the best images and GIFs with Imgur’s free mobile apps for iOS and Android.
About Imgur
Imgur is the best place to share and enjoy the most awesome images on the Internet. Every day, millions of people use Imgur to be entertained and inspired by funny, heartwarming, and helpful images and stories from all around the world.
Press Contact:
Michelle Masek
Director of Communications
press(at)imgur(dot)com