After working closely with Facebook over the past few months, David Recordon has left Six Apart to join the fast growing social platform with the title “Senior Open Programs Manager”. While the title may be a bit ambiguous, it’s clear that he’ll be working with Luke Shepard and others to help integrate open standards into Facebook. Earlier this year when I spoke with Recordon, he appeared pretty excited about Facebook’s continued opening of the platform.

This hire comes with news of others as Spencer Ante reports. According to Ante, Arturo Bejar “will soon join as a director of engineering from Yahoo!” This position will most likely Mike Schroepfer, the current VP of Engineering. Flush with an additional $200 million in cash, Mark Zuckerberg has been going on a hiring spree, starting with the acquisition of FriendFeed and now a number of other new hires.

According to Spencer Ante, this is part of a “40%-to-50% expansion of Facebook staff”. This morning I posted about the ongoing employee growth just before this news was released. I doubt that it’s a coincidence that both stories came out today. Facebook wants engineers around the world to know that they are hiring top talent, so go apply!

With the world class engineering talent on board at Facebook, one can only imagine what the future holds for the company. With the payment platform slowly being rolled, the expansion of Facebook Page features, and an ongoing focus on extending Facebook Connect to the rest of the web, it’s hard to envision anything but a bright future ahead for the company. Congrats to David Recordon and the other new hires!

It will be interesting to see what new offerings Facebook rolls out over the coming months with a fresh batch of top notch employees.

Image from SixApart Press area