Facebook's Jay Parikh, the veteran datacenter exec who helped the company cope with explosive user growth, is the latest insider to leave

• Veteran Facebook executive Jay Parikh, who helped build out company's global technical infrastructure, announced Tuesday that he will be stepping down.
• Parikh oversaw the massive expanse of software and hardware that allows Facebook to operate and also ran its internet drone project.
• He is the latest in a string of veteran executives to leave the social network in the past 18 months.
• Parikh did not say when he will step down or what he plans to do next, only that he'll be focused on transitioning the role "for the next few months."
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Facebook's vice president of engineering and infrastructure, Jay Parikh, announced plans to leave the company on Tuesday, the latest longtime executive to depart the social network as it faces one of the most challenging phases in its history.

Parikh, who has worked at Facebook for more than a decade, was largely responsible for helping the company build out and maintain its massive technical infrastructure, a network of expensive datacenters stocked with thousands of computers and spanning multiple continents.

"Facebook's growth created incredible opportunities to tackle some of the hardest scale and technological challenges the tech industry has ever seen," Parikh wrote in a Facebook post on Tuesday in which he announced plans to leave the company in the coming months.

Facebook saw its reach explode while Parikh was at the company, requiring major investments and innovations to handle an onslaught of traffic from billions of users of the flagship social network and popular apps like Instagram and Whatsapp. But Facebook has also come under intense criticism for its role in spreading misinformation, and for its slipshod approach to handling user data and privacy.

Parikh did not say what he will do after stepping down, only that he's focused for the next few months on transitioning his role and hopes to "explore what's next."

His exit follows a string of other company veterans who moved on during the past year or so, including former product head Chris Cox and VP of partnerships Dan Rose.

As one of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's top lieutenants at the company, Parikh spearheaded various ambitious initiatives such as internet connectivity and an internet drone project that was eventually abandoned.

"A lot of what we've achieved over the past eleven years just wouldn't have been possible without you. I don't think we even had a data center when you joined, and now we share our designs so the rest of the world can catch up!" Zuckerberg said in a comment in response to Parikh's announcement.

"I'm excited to spend time rediscovering what else is happening across our industry and to meet up with many new people," Parikh said.