Zorayr Khalapyan

Co-Founder

2022 - Current

Founder Fellow

2021 - 2023

Founder Fellow

2021 - 2021

Head of New Product Experimentation @ Messenger

2017 - 2021

As the company started prioritizing the younger generation, I shifted my role to start a brand new team to fundamentally rethink how Messenger would help teens connect and communicate with friends and family. I grew an org of 21+ amazing entrepreneurs, engineers, passionate designers and product mangers to grasp the changes in the demographics and incorporate new ways of expression, friending and story telling for teens! Given the extreme uncertainties in the space, the strategy was to rapidly prototype new products both in and outside of Messenger and through our speed of iteration, user research, analytics, build the next wave of social networks. Outside of my core work, I was also heavily involved in interviewing and hiring new talent, training new employees through classes and the bootcamp program, as well as mentoring the next generation of managers at the company! Completed over 250+ interviews and trained numerous employees to become better interviewers through my tenure at facebook. To be a great company, one must first be able to identify great talent. Over the years, I was trained to perform various types of interviews at facebook: starting from technical and architectural growing to more advanced roles as an interviewer, taking on product management, execution and behavioral interviews. I also grew to become one of the five bootcamp coach leads at the company, graduating over 300 new employees every month! Facebook bootcamp is an internal program for training and helping new employees succeed in their first steps at the company. I started as a bootcamp mentor, then became a mentor coach and eventually coach lead. Although this was not my primary role at the company, I loved my experience teaching engineers and helping new hires succeed!

Engineering Manager @ Stories

2016 - 2017

As an engineering manager on Facebook's Stories initiative, lead a team of 7 engineers to build a brand new ephemeral messaging product for developing countries which later paved the path for WhatsApp's exponential growth in stories adoption.

Software Engineer @ Messenger Growth

2014 - 2016

I was an early engineer on the team that helped Facebook Messenger grow from millions to one billion monthly active users. As the team grew, I focused primarily on new user acquisition, growing a team of 8 engineers and helping to onboard 100s of millions of new users to Messenger. The complexity was twofold for us: (a) how do we systematically find our next growth levers as our team grew, and (b) how do we test our hypothesis fast enough without jeopardizing millions of users who relied on our product to communicate with their loved ones? Over time, I learned to love product growth. I started training other engineers on how to think about experimentation, hypothesis-driven product innovation, and data analysis, as well as how to use our understanding of fundamental human behavior to serve user needs better and drive engagement.

Software Development Engineer in Test Intern

2013 - 2013

Software Developer Intern

2013 - 2013

Software Developer Engineer Intern

2012 - 2012

Mobile Software Architect

2010 - 2012

Software Developer Engineer Intern

2009 - 2009