• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, May 16, 2011

Ari Balogh, the former CTO and executive vice president of Products of Yahoo, has joined social recommendation service StumbleUpon as the company's vice president of engineering.

Starting next month, Balogh will report to CEO Garrett Camp and oversee all of the company's engineering functions including product development, science, infrastructure and internal IT support. He will also become a part of the company's executive management team, StumbleUpon announced Monday.

Balogh left Yahoo in April 2010, citing personal reasons for his departure. Before joining the Web portal in 2008, he had been CTO and head of global product design for VeriSign spending nearly ten years leading all product and internal technology.

StumbleUpon, which says its serves more than 1 billion personalized recommendations to 15 million users monthly, landed $17 million in venture funding in March from investors including Accel Partners and August Capital, and has raised $18.5 million to date. More than 60,000 marketers to date have advertised on StumbleUpon, according to the company.