Zaven Nahapetyan is  driven and ambitious developer, designing and building the next-generation social media platform as a co-founder and the Chief Technology Officer of Niche. Zaven is a hands-on leader involved in all aspects of coding from frontend to blockchain smart contracts. He excels at scaling projects from zero users to billions and leading initiatives with hundreds of engineers.

Zaven was previously an Engineering Manager and Organizational Lead for Facebook, completing their most fast-paced and critical projects. He developed key initiatives including Facebook’s Fundraisers, which has raised over $5 billion for charities, and their cross country Covid-19 response. Zaven brought civic engagement to Instagram through the voter registration features, actively combated misinformation by leading Facebook and Instagram’s election integrity efforts, and helped create the dominant mobile UI framework for Facebook. Earlier in his career, Zaven worked as an engineer for Palantir Technologies and Oscar Health, and as an intern for Google, where at just 19 years old he wrote code that is still used by Android today.

Zaven holds dual degrees in Molecular Biology and Computer Science from Waterloo University in Ontario, Canada. Raised in Armenia during the historic dark and cold days, Zaven fled with his family to Toronto where he began building mobile apps and programming at 11 years old. Fluent in Armenian, English, and Russian, Zaven is also a certified rescue scuba diver who travels to South East Asia almost every year for diving.