Ari Balogh steps down as Yahoo CTO

Yahoo's chief technology officer has announced that he will step down from his senior role at the company on 3 June, citing personal reasons.

Ari Balogh joined Yahoo in February 2008 and was responsible for technology development in areas covering infrastructure, engineering, research and development, products and service delivery.

Prior to his role at Yahoo, Balogh was executive vice president and chief technology officer at VeriSign.

Balogh said in a statement that the decision to step down had been tough, and that he hoped that the work he had undertaken would help Yahoo thrive in the future.

"This was my dream job, which makes this decision very hard. I am confident that the incredible people at Yahoo will deliver against our vision to be the centre of people's online lives," he said.

Yahoo thanked Balogh for his many contributions to the company, and will name a replacement in the coming weeks.

Yahoo is attempting to reinvigorate itself in the search and mobile web markets and claim back market share from Google.

The firm signed a 10-year search deal with Microsoft in December 2009 to use the Bing engine to power its search function.