PayPal and Slide Co-founder Becomes a Google VP of Engineering

Max Levchin, the founder of recently-acquired Slide and co-founder ofPayPal, has been named Google’s newest vice president of engineering.

Levchin joined the company as part of Google’s $182 million acquisition of Slide, the company he founded and ran as CEO for nearly six years. He will now report to Urs Holzle, Google’s senior vice president of operations, according to Inside Facebook. We’ve reached out to Google for more details about his new role.

The decision to make Levchin a VP of engineering makes perfect sense, especially for a company trying to break into social networkingand fend off Facebook, whose rapid growth is perceived as a threat.

Levchin was the CTO of PayPal and responsible for its anti-fraud technology. He also co-created one of the earliest forms of CAPTCHA, the Gausebeck-Levchin test. At Slide, Levchin helped build some of the Facebook’s most popular applications, including FunWall, SuperPoke and Top Friends.

Google will be relying on Levchin’s technological and social expertise in its quest to become more social. How he’ll help lead that effort is unclear, but it’s almost certain to involve Google Me, the search giant’s rumored competitor to Facebook.