Apple Poaches Senior Netflix Engineer for Streaming-Tech Team

Click here to read the full article.

Apple has tapped nine-year Netflix veteran Ruslan Meshenberg as an engineering leader on its streaming-video team.

Meshenberg tweeted news of his joining Apple on Monday, posting a photo of the tech company’s HQ at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, Calif., and the caption, “New adventure!” According to his updated LinkedIn profile, his title at Apple is “engineering leader.”

More from Variety

Most recently, Meshenberg was VP of productivity engineering at Netflix, where he had formed and oversaw an organization focused on accelerating productivity of the company’s engineers. Previously, he was director of cloud platform for Netflix, where his work included leading initiatives that spanned across all engineering teams, including migration of Netflix infrastructure, core services and databases to Amazon’s AWS.

Prior to joining Netflix in 2011, Meshenberg worked as a software engineer at Yahoo, Telenav and Hewlett-Packard.

An Apple rep declined to comment on Meshenberg’s hiring, which was previously reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Last November, Apple launched Apple TV Plus, the company’s foray into the subscription-streaming arena to compete with Netflix and others. Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts on the company’s earnings call Tuesday that “Apple TV Plus is off to a rousing start” but he didn’t provide any subscriber numbers. CFO Luca Maestri said Apple TV Plus didn’t generate material revenue in the year-end 2019 quarter but that the company expects it to start contributing to Apple’s services division. With the launch of the service Apple is giving away Apple TV Plus free for one year to customers who buy a new device; normally it’s $4.99 monthly.

Best of Variety

Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.