Former Digg VP Of Engineering Lands At Gilt Groupe

Alexia Tsotsis

Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... → Learn More

Friday, November 26th, 2010

Well there’s at least one former Digg engineer out there that had a happier Thanksgiving. We’ve gotten word that John Quinn, former Digg VP of Engineering, will be joining luxury discount marketplace Gilt Groupe as VP of Engineering come next Monday. Quinn will be working out of the Gilt Groupe New York office under CIO Steve Jacobs.

Prior to Gilt Groupe, Quinn had spent three years at Digg and before that was VP of Engineering at Squaretrade. According to our sources, Quinn was instrumental in the problematic Digg v4 redesign and its bumpy move over to a Cassandra versus MySQL database. Judging by the Digg team page Digg has not yet replaced Quinn as VP.

Gilt Groupe CIO Steve Jacobs tells TechCrunch that the new hire will be focusing on scaling and that the company is growing rapidly, “Gilt is expanding into new businesses all the time and we’re making sure that we have the right people in place. People do not think of Gilt as a technology company and we are a technology company.” When asked about concerns that Quinn bore responsibility for some of Digg’s infrastructure stumbles, Jacobs said, “I’m not worried about that for Gilt.”

Gilt Groupe, which has $83 million in funding led by Matrix Partners, recently launched Gilt City, a local deals network that aims to be a more high-end niche Groupon.

Company: Gilt Groupe
Website: gilt.com
Launch Date: 2007
Funding: $236M

Headquartered in New York, Gilt Groupe is a privately held company dedicated to providing its members with access to coveted fashion and luxury lifestyle brands at sample sale prices. Gilt Groupe includes sales for men, women, and home as well as Gilt City (geo-specific), Gilt Taste (food), and Jetsetter (travel). Gilt Groupe hand selects both established and up and coming brands relevant to its membership base. Each Gilt Groupe Shopping Event is designer-specific and held over a one day...

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John D. Quinn is currently the VP of Engineering at Gilt Groupe. He previously served as the VP of Engineering at Digg. Prior to starting at Digg in early 2008, John spent 8 years as the VP of Engineering at SquareTrade. He previously worked as a principal software engineer at Oracle.

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