Meta is losing the executive who built the infrastructure behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Santosh Janardhan, the company's longtime head of infrastructure and co-head of engineering, is stepping down, Meta confirmed on Wednesday, 11 November 2026.

Janardhan joined the company in 2009, when it was still Facebook, and went on to oversee the data centres, networks and computing systems that serve nearly four billion people across Meta's apps. He will stay on through the first quarter of 2027 to manage the handover, then move into an advisory role on Meta Compute, the company's programme to scale its data centre investment.

He will be replaced by Dave Brown, who joined Meta earlier this year as vice president of infrastructure after 19 years at Amazon Web Services, where he worked on compute, cloud and artificial intelligence. Brown will formally run Meta's infrastructure operations and serve as chief technology officer of Meta Compute, an initiative led by Meta president and vice chairman Dina Powell McCormick and technical leader Daniel Gross.

Meta has not said why Janardhan is leaving. Bloomberg first reported the departure, citing an internal memo circulated to staff. In the memo, Janardhan did not give reasons for the move but wrote of the need to "pass the baton", according to CNBC. A Meta representative confirmed he would remain for the transition before moving into the advisory role.

The change comes at a critical moment for Meta. The company is in the middle of a huge infrastructure build-out to support its artificial intelligence ambitions, with chief executive Mark Zuckerberg committing to spend upwards of $37 billion on data centres and computing resources this year alone. Earlier this year Janardhan was put in charge of leading Meta Compute, the initiative charged with turning that spending into working capacity.

Janardhan's departure is the second senior leadership exit from Meta's operations in recent weeks. Chief strategy officer Dave Wehner announced earlier this month that he was leaving to become chief financial officer of Fireworks, an AI training and inference start-up. The back-to-back departures leave Meta reshaping the team that runs its physical computing backbone just as the AI race demands more of it.

For now, the transition is orderly: Brown has been inside the company for months, Janardhan remains until early 2027, and Meta says the build-out continues. But the exit of a 17-year veteran who ran the systems underpinning every Meta product is a significant changing of the guard at the heart of the company's AI push.

Sources: TechCrunch and Reuters.