BuzzFeed names Todd Levy as its new CTO

BuzzFeed has a new chief technology officer — Todd Levy, who was already serving as the vice president of engineering.

Levy also co-founded and served as CTO at Bitly. He joined BuzzFeed through the acquisition of startup Torando Labs in 2014. As part of the deal, he was tasked with creating a new data engineering team at the company.

Todd Levy “It is without hyperbole when I say that [Levy] has revolutionized the way we architect systems, improve software, collect data, and deploy code,” said BuzzFeed Publisher Dao Nguyen in an email to employees. “His mentorship within tech [has] been an inspiration to many, and I am very excited for him to formally take on Engineering leadership.”

As CTO, Levy will oversee an engineering team that BuzzFeed tells me consists of exactly 100 people. BuzzFeed’s last CTO was Mark Wilkie, who’s now CTO at Minnesota startup Who’s Driving (though if you use the Konami Code on the BuzzFeed website, you’ll see that he still has a presence of sorts).

“I’m excited to be taking on a broader role with the tech organization,” Levy said in a statement provided by the company. “BuzzFeed thrives on an experimental culture, and while we’ve made fantastic progress in the first part of the year in overhauling our systems to support that approach, we’re just getting started and have a ton of exciting projects ahead of us.”

Levy’s promotion comes in the same week as the announcement of broader restructuring on BuzzFeed’s editorial side, with the team now divided into an entertainment unit and a news unit.