Marissa Mayer just made her biggest hire yet.

Yahoo has poached Henrique de Castro, a top executive from Google (Mayer's previous company), to serve as its new chief operating officer, the company announced Monday. In his new role, de Castro will oversee Yahoo's sales, media and business development efforts, and report directly to Mayer.

De Castro played a key role in Google's global sales efforts as the president of global media, mobile and platform at the company. Before that he worked at Dell and McKinsey. For months, rumors have circulated that Mayer wanted to hire away de Castro fill an unspecified position at Yahoo.

Yahoo will reportedly pay de Castro an annual base salary of $600,000, along with $36 million in stock grants, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Monday.

“Henrique is an incredibly accomplished and rigorous business leader, and I’m personally excited to have him join Yahoo!’s strong leadership team,” Mayer said in a statement. “His operational experience in Internet advertising and his proven success in structuring and scaling global organizations make him the perfect fit for Yahoo! as we propel the business to its next phase of growth.”

Since taking over Yahoo in July, Mayer has made several high profile hires, including bringing on a new chief marketing officer (Kathy Savitt) and a new executive VP for HR (Jacqueline Reses).

Image courtesy of Flickr, nrkbeta

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