Today, Todd Kloots (@toddkloots) joined Twitter after more than seven years at Yahoo! as a front-end engineer focused on the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) library for interactive Web applications, after previous work on the company's massive Yahoo! Mail product, where he worked on the service's front-end and design. Todd's joining Twitter continues the company's growth, pulling like a massive magnet from Silicon Valley's top companies toward the blue-logoed beacon in San Francisco, following hires from Facebook, Google, and other Valley leaders.
Kloots, who is credited with 10 years of web dev experience, joins Twitter a week or so after Michael Busch (@michibusch), who worked at IBM for the last five years as a software engineer and architect, joined the company as a search engineer. His LinkedIn profile says he was focused on "indexing, search and scale-out" for IBM's eDiscovery Analyzer product. As mentioned frequently here, Twitter's mountain of data badly needs some strong attention toward indexing and scale-out, so his hire looks to bode well for making their search tools more relevant.
Jesse Stay and others highlighted Busch's hiring last week. Also noted last week was Twitter's crossing the 140th employee mark, a milestone for the company obsessed with 140 characters. (In the comments, a fellow Twitter employee says Michael was not #140) Jesse also highlights Busch's background with the open source Lucene search project.
You can see Kloots' presentation of the new YUI 3 at Yahoo! from the fall of 2009 at the Yahoo! Developer Network for an idea of his previous work.