Power players: the most important Facebook execs you've never heard of

Koum grew up on foodstamps in Ukraine, but is now worth an estimated $7.7 billion dollars, thanks largely to the WhatsApp acquisition. He and his cofounder, Brian Acton, both still work at WhatsApp today, and Koum is the only employee other than Zuckerberg and Sandberg to serve on Facebook's board of directors.

Although he keeps a pretty low profile, he does announce all of the app's milestones — like that it now has 900 million monthly active users — on his public Facebook page.

As VP of advertising technology, Brian Boland has turned Facebook's ad-tech business into a force to be reckoned with. With Atlas, Audience Network, and LiveRail forming a powerful suite of tools for advertisers, the company aims to steal ad dollars from Google.

Boland also has a firm idea on where the future of ad tech is headed: "Forget the ongoing debate over 'open' and 'closed' ecosystems or walled gardens — the future of ad tech is integration."

Before Facebook, Boland founded Kinetic Entertainment, an entertainment marketing and promotion firm.

Jay Parikh, the VP of infrastructure engineering, oversees Facebook’s vast technological ecosystem. If you don’t receive a notification or tag in a post, it is Parikh and his team’s job to find out why. Under his leadership, Facebook has continually optimized its computing infrastructure, saving it over $1 billion.

Mike Vernal's a Facebook veteran: He's been at the company nearly eight years, joining from Microsoft way back in 2008. Today, the VP heads up search, local, profile and developer products (known as the "utility" group).

"We’re focused on making Facebook a place you go to answer questions, to make better decisions, and to get a better understanding of the real world around you," Vernal told Fast Company last year, when Facebook was testing "context cards" to let users see when their friends have seen the same movie or visited the same city if they check-in.

With more location-based notifications, Facebook is trying to become the only thing you look at on your phone.

Being VP of commerce and platform means that Deb Liu oversees a whole bunch of initiatives for supporting developers, like Facebook login, app analytics, games, and payments. She's also the force behind Facebook's mobile app install ads, which have swelled into a multibillion-dollar, fast-growing business.

One of the initiatives Liu runs is FbStart, which gives early-stage developers all over the world access to free tools and services.

Facebook reached 1 billion monthly active users in 2012 and has continued to grow since, announcing 1.55 billion MAUs in its last earnings. Schultz leads the team driving that user acquisition and retention.

Interestingly, he studied physics, not marketing, for his master's at the University of Cambridge, but got his feet wet while learning SEO for his paper-airplane website.

He's also proudly gay and contributed to Facebook's "It Gets Better" video.

Dan Levy focuses on making sure that the more than 45 million small businesses using Facebook Pages to connect with their customers feel like the social network gives them what they need.

The VP of small business is also responsible for making sure that they're buying a lot of Facebook ads and has grown its SMB advertising business to billions in revenue from millions of clients.

Back in May when Facebook first announced its new Instant Articles product, which lets publishers post their stories directly to its iOS app, the media world fell into a tizzy about what it would mean for the industry.

But initial hesitance aside, content creators have jumped in headfirst. The initiative just officially launched to all iPhone users in October, and Justin Osofsky, VP of global operations and media partnerships, has enlisted more than 50 publications, which are publishing thousands of stories a day through Instant Articles.

Charged with cleaning up after Facebook’s awkward attempts at TV ads, easing privacy concerns, and convincing shareholders that Facebook did care about making money, Gary Briggs became the first-ever chief marketing officer in 2013.

Today, Facebook's user base growing at a healthy clip and its stock price keeps hitting new highs. Fun fact: Briggs is also on the advisory board of Lagunitas Brewing Co., a well-loved San Francisco beer.

The company has promised that Facebook at Work, the version of the social network optimized for businesses, will be rolled out of beta by the end of the year.

Director of global platform partnerships Julien Codorniou has led the project, alongside his other duties like helping developers monetize their products through FB.

As Facebook’s VP of human resources for over seven years, Lori Goler has tried to find ways to make the company an amazing place to work.

And she's done a pretty bang-up job: Facebook ranked No. 13 on GlassDoor's 2015 ranking of best places to work and first on PayScale's list.

Goler landed at Facebook by cold-calling Sheryl Sandberg. She started in recruiting but got promoted to the head of HR only a few months later.

She told Fortune that Sandberg offered her some crucial life advice:

"I told her that I didn't have a lot of experience leading recruiting organizations, and she responded by saying that most men would not let that get in the way of taking a new opportunity."

LeCun leads the company's artificial intelligence research arm, which has laboratories in New York, California, and Paris, diving into topics like computer vision, machine learning, and computational neuroscience.

Facebook puts its deep-learning research to work in recognizing pictures, targeting ads, and understanding speech. Facebook M, which launched in beta in August, aims to "supercharge AI" by pairing technoloy with a human touch.

LeCun is also a part-time professor at New York University. Read an interesting Q&A with him here.

Michael Abrash, the chief scientist at Facebook-owned Oculus, is hustling to make sure that the company's headset hits virtual shelves early next year.

Virtual reality has the runway to become truly available to everyone, he recently said on stage at Vanity Fair's recent New Establishment Summit.

Oculus divulged that Abrash had joined the company from video-game-development company Valve only three days after Facebook announced the acquisition.

As director of diversity, Williams works to alter the company's relatively dismal employee statistics. For the last two years she's scored partnerships with organizations like YesWeCode and Code2040, which support minorities in tech, and has started initiatives to recruit from underserved communities as well.

"For Facebook, diversity is imperative to our future growth," she told USA Today's Jessica Guynn earlier this year. "If we don't get it right, we risk losing relevance in an incredibly diverse world."

A six-year Facebook veteran, VP of data center operations Delfina Eberly makes sure that the social network's infrastructure is both scalable and secure, all around the world. That's no small task, considering Facebook has more than one billion daily active users.

Learn more about Facebook's innovative data centers here.

Jason Taylor is a VP of infrastructure at Facebook and has been charged with running the company’s Open Compute Project, which strives to make data-center hardware design free and "open source."

In other words, Facebook shares the hardware designs of its efficient, environmentally-friendly data centers to encourage collaboration and innovation across the space.

Since Facebook launched OCP in 2011 (Taylor didn't found it), the initiative has saved the company over $2 billion.

Instagram didn't have a chief operating officer until Levine got the gig late last year.

She was "poached" from her role as Facebook's VP of global public policy, and now runs the photo app's HR and comms, while overseeing partnerships, marketing, and business operations, too.

Levine is also a board member of Sheryl Sandberg's empowerment organization Lean In.

Daniels is the VP of product for Internet.org, the Facebook-led imitative to bring internet connectivity to the entire planet.

In the last year, Internet.org has expanded Free Basics, which helps companies partner with local service providers to let people use their apps without paying, and announced plans to launch an internet-bearing satellite with France's Eutelsat Communications.

Before spear-heading these Internet.org efforts, Daniels handled biz-dev and partnerships for FB, and worked for the likes of Lehman Brothers and Microsoft before that.

Yael Maguire heads Facebook’s Connectivity Lab, a sub-section of Internet.org that is building "Aquila," the solar powered plane that aims to beam internet to places without the necessary infrastructure.

Before coming to Facebook, Maguire cofounded, ThinkMagic, which pioneered RFID, a game-changing wireless sensor technology.

Watch Maguire give a detailed explanation of the Aquila project here.

Fidji Simo and Will Cathcart are the duo behind the extraordinary rise of video on Facebook.

The platform now generates 8 billion video views per day from more than 500 million people, and has started to ramp up its video monetization efforts. Small businesses are getting in on the action too, with 1.5 million having posted at least on video in September, as the company announced on its earnings call.

Simo and Cathcart's work is likely ringing some alarm bells at YouTube as they aim to make Facebook the "best place to watch and share videos."

Naomi Gleit wants to find new ways to help the 1.55 billion people on Facebook every month use it for more important things than liking each other's sunset photos. Leading the company's small social good team, she's launched new features like push notifications for Amber Alerts and "Safety Checks" for people in disaster areas.

Gleit first joined Facebook way back in July 2005.

She told Mashable that she had written a paper about Facebook while she was in college at Stanford and then visited its first office "pretty much every week for a few months" to try to get hired. Her first job was in marketing.

Zhuo first joined Facebook at 22 in 2006 as the company's first intern.

Today, as co-director of product design, she leads the teams making sure that your Facebook News Feed looks just as good on your smartphone as it does on desktop, and that all of the other core products, like Groups and Events, look and work beautifully, too.

She's also a prolific blogger — read Zhuo's work here.

Margaret Gould Stewart, the other co-director of product design, is in charge of leading user experience design for all ad products at Facebook.

During a TED Talk, she revealed the one question that moves her forward: “How do we design user experiences that change the world in fundamental ways?”

Before coming to Facebook in 2012, Stewart directed user experience at YouTube and Google.

Ime Archibong directs strategic partnerships at the social media giant, leading the team charged with connecting with various business partners.

Archibong’s team has had their hands in everything from the Facebook Messenger app to Internet.org. For example, a few years ago his team sealed a deal with entertainment company Rovi to use its database of movies, TV shows, and celebrities to improve search and discovery on FB.

Earlier this year, Facebook launched Lite, a new version of its Android app that uses less data, allowing it to work even on the spotty connections and targeted towards places like Africa and Latin America. Vijay Shankar manages Facebook Lite and vows to make the social network function on every phone.

Shankar previously worked for Apple and Qualcomm, and volunteers on the board for Sankara Cancer Foundation which works with non-profit hospitals in India to help poor individuals deal with cancer.

Tim Campos is constantly focused on productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness.

From automating parts of the server repair process to hooking up the parking lot to keep track of its number of free spaces, the chief information officer makes creative streamlining a top priority.

"The role of IT and how you do your job is usually operational and about efficiency and cost saving," Tim Campos told Computer Weekly in a 2011 interview. "Facebook is quite frugal, but there is so much more emphasis on innovation. It is not just about the squeeze."

The head of Facebook’s News Feed has been shaping and reshaping the way people communicate on the site since 2008. For example, Adam Mosseri recently led the launch FB's new emoji reactions which aim to move beyond the "like" button.

He focuses on "bridging the gap between design and engineering."

This "emerging markets" advertising and product trio are dead-set on making sure that anyone can use Facebook across any level of connectivity — and that the social network can rake in ad dollars from all of them.

Chris Struhar tackles improvements on the product side like, for example, creating an open-sourced Network Connection Class system that lets the app figure out a user's connection speed on the fly.

Meanwhile, Kelly MacLean and Nikila Srinivasan work on making sure Facebook offers unique ad formats for markets like India, where it launched "missed call ads."

Jeffrey Wieland founded the Facebook Accessibility team in 2011 after he realized that the app was under-serving a chunk of its users: people with disabilities.

His goal is to make sure that people who are blind, deaf, or can't use a keyboard can still access the social network. That entails working across different product and engineering groups. For example, Facebook's artificial intelligence team has been using improvements in computer vision and language recognition to work on an app built specifically for blind people who want to hear what's in the photos in their News Feeds.

"We wanted to build empathy into our engineering,” Wieland tells Wired.