Former Yahoo search GM Vish Makhijani is on the move again; he’s joining social gaming company Zynga in a “senior operating role,” TechCrunch reports; we’ve confirmed that he’ll be heading up the casual games division. The new position comes less than a year after Makhijani left Yahoo to head up Yandex Labs, the research arm of Russian search engine Yandex. He’ll join Yandex’ board, and start at Zynga in June.

SEE ALSO: Vish Makhijani Becoming CEO of Yandex Labs, Not Yandex; Company Buys Online Traffic Info Firm

The social gaming company has been on hiring spree: EA exec Brandon Barber joined as its VP of marketing in March, followed by former Advice Company CEO Steven Lurie—who is now GM of Zynga’s mobile group, and MTV Networks vet Roy Sehgal—who’s heading up a new in-house game development studio. Zynga has grown into one of the top traffic drivers to both Facebook and MySpace, and said it topped 10 million daily active users as of May 12.