February 23, 2012 - 11:44 AMT
Twitter hires two high-profile Google execs

Twitter has hired two high-profile Google execs - Shailesh Rao and Stephen McIntrye - to lead an aggressive international expansion in advertising, All Things D reported.

Rao will be joining the online communications network as VP of international revenue and will be starting in April in San Francisco. In that job, he’ll be in charge of setting up direct sales operations in countries and in regions where Twitter is ready to monetize.

At Google, Rao was most recently head of Google’s display ads business for Asia.

McIntrye has joined Twitter as a director of online sales and operations, which is its self-serve product that will debut to small businesses in March. He will be based in Dublin, Ireland. He was most recently working on Google’s international self-serve ads team in Ireland.

Both will report to Twitter sales head Adam Bain, who heads a staff of 120 employees in the U.S., UK, Japan and Ireland.

The pair was not the only Google hires of late at Twitter. The company recently hired UK YouTube sales head Bruce Daisley to run its entire sales team there.