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.