Hot social gaming company Playdom has hired former Yahoo executive David Sobeski as chief technology officer.
The hire shows that the company is still able to pick off executives from old guard tech companies as it continues to grow its social game business. Playdom dominates social games on the MySpace social network and has been investing heavily in Facebook games as well.
Sobeski most recently served as senior vice president in charge of open strategy and data platform at Yahoo. Before joining Yahoo, he was a general manager at Microsoft working on a variety of projects including the user experience of Windows Vista (it’s his fault?) and mobile Microsoft Exchange Server.
The Mountain View, Calif., company now has 38 million monthly active users on Facebook, largely on the success of titles such as Social City and Tiki Resort, according to AppData. Playdom raised $43 million in November, giving it the war chest to hire game industry veterans, as well as people such as Sobeski from tech media companies. Playdom’s chief executive is John Pleasants, former chief operating officer of Electronic Arts.