Rokt Appoints Bill Barton as Chief Operating Officer Overseeing People

Bill Barton was appointed after previously serving as Chief Product and Engineering Officer at Rokt and as a strategic advisor to the company.

His new role reflects both his strong technology background and the company’s view that, in the age of AI, building and scaling organizations has become an increasingly technology-driven discipline.

As COO, Bill Barton will oversee People, Security, and Legal at Rokt. The People team will now bring together talent acquisition, people operations, employment legal, and people business partners under one leadership structure. Security and Legal will support the company’s efforts to attract talent, protect its technology, and manage risk as it grows.

Barton will also continue leading Rokt’s Swarm initiative, a cross-functional team focused on the company’s most important product development projects. The initiative is part of Rokt’s strategy to build a flatter, faster, and more agile engineering organization.

Bill Barton brings more than 40 years of experience in product and engineering leadership. Before joining Rokt as Chief Product and Engineering Officer, he spent 10 years at Amazon, where he was one of the early architects of Alexa and led teams responsible for language understanding and knowledge capabilities.

Earlier in his career, Barton held senior leadership positions at NAVTEQ, Nokia, Revolabs, and Microsoft. He earned a degree in Physics from Harvard University.

"Bill has spent his career solving hard problems at the intersection of technology and human systems, from building Alexa to leading R&D here at Rokt," said Bruce Buchanan, CEO, Rokt. "The COO role sits at the intersection of our people, our risk posture, and our ability to operate at speed. His combination of technical depth and genuine passion for organizational development makes him exactly the right person for it. The way he thinks about AI's impact on how teams work and what they're capable of is precisely the lens we need on these functions right now."

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"Over the past decade, I've become increasingly focused on how you actually scale a team's potential through culture, organization design, and removing the barriers that slow people down," Barton said. "AI is making that work fundamentally more technical. The question of how you build an organization that fully unlocks what AI makes possible requires the same rigor you'd bring to any hard engineering challenge."

About Rokt

Founded in 2012 and headquartered in New York City, Rokt is an ecommerce technology company that uses AI to make customer interactions more relevant during online transactions. It's AI platform and ecommerce network power billions of transactions and connect hundreds of millions of consumers worldwide.

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