Hari Krishnan, LinkedIn’s first Asia-Pacific employee, is now managing director for Asia-Pacific and Japan

Professional social network LinkedIn announced today that it has appointed a new managing director for Asia-Pacific and Japan. He is Hari Krishnan, the company’s first Asia Pacific employee who joined in 2009.

Now based in LinkedIn’s Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore, the veteran tech executive and entrepreneur was formerly LinkedIn’s country manager for India. In his three years there, he set up operations from the ground up and grew the social network’s presence from 3.4M registered users in November 2009 to over 18M in December 2012.

He’s replacing Arvind Rajan, who has moved on to become managing director and vice president of New Markets, where he will focus on evaluating new market opportunities across the globe.

Hari has worked at some of the top tech firms in his decade-plus of work experience. He was a product manager and customer support engineer at Cisco Systems, then a business development and strategy manager at Yahoo! India, and a VP for corporate planning and marketing at Travelguru.

He then moved on to start Stylkist.com, an online lifestyle boutique (the domain name’s no longer in use), and joined MySpace India as country head for a year before his stint at LinkedIn.

“LinkedIn has grown tremendously in the Asia-Pacific region over the past year, but we are still in the early stages of our expansion,” Hari said.

The social network has grown its footprint in Asia in recent years. It now has ten offices, over 350 employees, four Asian languages, and 37M registered users in the region — up from 12M a year ago.