Yahoo Hires Star Mobile Engineer Who Used To Work At Pinterest

Pinterest Cynthia Maxwell, Pinterest

Cynthia Maxwell, the software engineer responsible for Pinterest's great iPhone/iPad and Android apps, has just joined Yahoo's mobile group, Business Insider has learned.

Maxwell was employee No. 10 at Pinterest and had worked at Apple on iOS before that. We named her on our 2012 list of 25 Powerful Women Engineers to watch.

So, we were watching when we noticed that she left Pinterest in September. She just surfaced at Yahoo as the senior director of engineering for Yahoo!'s Mobile and Emerging Products Team, run by Adam Cahan.

Cahan is one of Mayer's fresh-faced new leaders who became senior vice president of this team in October, 2012. He was the former CEO of IntoNow, acquired for by Yahoo for more than $20 million in 2011.

Yahoo has a reputation of acqu-hires for this team, starting with Mayer’s first acquisition, Stamped, which she then shut down. Mayer also bought and shutdown Propeld, Alike OnTheAir and Astrid, adding cofounders to its ranks. For instance, Josh Schwarzapel, the cofounder/CEO of OnTheAir is now a senior product manager for the mobile team.

But clearly, not everyone came to Yahoo through an acqu-hire. Other folks include:

• John Thrall, VP of mobile engineering, who moved to mobile in January after six years in the "Media products" group;
• Benoit Schillings, a Yahoo technical fellow, who previously worked on Facebook's Android app and at Nokia before that;
• Stephane Karoubi, director of mobile engineering who came from Microsoft's MSN and before that, lead the team that created Microsoft's first, short-lived phone, the KIN.

Interested? A search on LinkedIn shows that Michael Viguilla is the headhunter for the group.

You can meet the team through this newly produced recruitment video, too.

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