IRL (In Real Life), the leading group messaging social network that brings people together through group chats, events and shared experiences, announces the addition of two senior executives from leading social media companies that will be instrumental to the company’s continued growth. Joining the IRL team are Alex Strand as Head of Engineering and Joanne Lee as Head of Partnerships. Strand and Lee both have extensive backgrounds in the social media industry in their respective roles and will bring their experience to the IRL team as it continues to scale. Strand most recently served as Director of Engineering at Snapchat for nearly six years, while Lee joins from a strategy and partnerships leadership role at Instagram.

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“IRL has experienced massive growth over the past year, emerging as a leader within the social and messaging landscape,” said Abraham Shafi, CEO and Co-Founder of IRL. “Alex, Joanne and all of the top-tier talent we’ve recently hired are crucial to the continued mission and success of our platform. With this new talent, we will be able to keep evolving our product and form even more dynamic partnerships to truly make IRL the best social messaging platform available for our users.”

Alex Strand, IRL’s Head of Engineering, brings over 15 years of engineering and software development skills to IRL. In his last two roles, Strand was Director of Engineering at Snapchat and held numerous software development roles within Amazon. For IRL, Strand will head up the entire engineering team, helping to scale, improve and bring extensive innovations to the IRL platform and app.

Joanne Lee, IRL’s Head of Partnerships, joins the team after most recently working for Instagram as its Head of Content Strategy and Planning. Her past experience also includes many years among the heavyweights of social media, bringing her expertise to companies such as Facebook, Google, YouTube and Sony. Lee will oversee all partnerships for IRL, creating lasting and impactful connections for the brand while also finding interesting ways to create more awareness for the IRL platform and added value for its users.

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These new two hires come during a year of massive growth for IRL. Just last month, the platform announced the hiring of five other major executives from companies such as Google, Lyft, TikTok, PlayVS and Daversa Partners. Further, IRL recently hired Jason Kirk as its CBO, who joined from Disney. The leading group messaging social network has experienced 400% growth over the last year and a half alone. Each of these new hires will continue to aid IRL’s growth as it builds out its operations, partnerships and business in support of the platform’s 16M, predominantly US Gen Z users that send over 100M messages daily.