By Sheila Dang and Katie Paul

(Reuters) – Meta Platforms veteran Javier Olivan is taking up as the corporate’s chief working officer after enjoying a vital however largely behind-the-scenes function stoking the social media firm’s explosive progress for 15 years.

The Spaniard will exchange Sheryl Sandberg, who introduced on Wednesday she was stepping down from Meta.

The transfer comes as Meta struggles with slowing progress and rising prices. It’s reworking from a social media firm to 1 centered on constructing the metaverse, a group of digital worlds that could possibly be a decade away.

Olivan, who grew up within the Pyrenees area of northern Spain, holds levels in electrical and industrial engineering from the College of Navarra and a grasp’s in enterprise administration from Stanford College.

Earlier than becoming a member of Fb (NASDAQ:) in late 2007 as head of worldwide progress, Olivan, 44, labored at Japan’s NTT and Siemens.

When he joined, Fb was a younger firm with about 40 million customers and now has practically 3.6 billion customers throughout Fb and different apps resembling Instagram.

Whereas overseeing its worldwide strikes, Olivan pushed Fb’s enlargement into nations resembling India, Japan, Russia, Indonesia and Brazil, in line with an interview he gave in 2010 to VentureBeat.

Critics say the corporate pursued this progress with out ample safeguards in opposition to the unfold of misinformation, hate speech or dangerous content material in rising markets.

Former Fb product supervisor and whistleblower Frances Haugen final 12 months leaked inner paperwork that she stated confirmed Fb put income over consumer security and lacked ample controls to take away dangerous content material in languages apart from English.

Olivan, who in line with media studies enjoys paragliding and browsing, has most lately served as chief progress officer. In that place, he has managed options and features that span Fb and Instagram in addition to messaging apps WhatsApp and Messenger.

In his new job, he’ll proceed to steer infrastructure and company improvement. However his portfolio can even embrace promoting and enterprise merchandise, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in a Fb put up on Wednesday.

One factor is unlikely to vary. Olivan will proceed to remain out of the limelight as he carries out the COO job. This contrasts with Sandberg, who appeared earlier than Congress, wrote a best-selling guide about girls within the office and sometimes represented Fb to exterior audiences.

“This function will likely be totally different from what Sheryl has accomplished. Will probably be a extra conventional COO function the place Javi will likely be centered internally and operationally, constructing on his robust observe report of constructing our execution extra environment friendly and rigorous,” Zuckerberg stated.

Now that Meta is a mature enterprise with $118 billion in income, Olivan could have much less autonomy than Sandberg did when she joined within the firm’s early years, stated Brian Wieser, world president of enterprise intelligence at advert company GroupM.

A key query is whether or not Olivan will likely be “extra attentive,” to points concerning information privateness in addition to defending manufacturers from having their advertisements seem subsequent to unsuitable content material, Wieser stated.