Sprint chief technology officer Stephen Bye is resigning

Sprint’s chief technology officer, Stephen Bye, is resigning effective July 24, the Overland Park-based wireless company said Tuesday.

An email from Sprint said Bye “decided to leave Sprint to pursue other opportunities.”

Since November, Sprint’s network and technology teams have been under the direction of technical chief operating officer Junichi Miyakawa, who came from Tokyo-based SoftBank Corp. SoftBank owns 80 percent of Sprint.

At the time, Sprint chief executive Marcelo Claure praised the company’s top three executives, which included chief network officer John Saw, in charge of the network efforts.

“I have the utmost confidence in the combined talent of Miyakawa, Stephen Bye and John Saw to bring a better network experience to all our customers,” Claure said in an email to employees last fall.

Bye’s exit comes as Claure begins to tout the company’s network performance.

At the same time, Claure has announced plans to boost the network by adding towers and small cellular sites to carry customers’ wireless connections better. Sprint’s statement said Bye will work on that effort, called network evolution, a few more weeks.

Bye gained the chief technology officer post last August and has worked under a two-year employment agreement signed in October 2012 that was renewable each year.

Bye’s post makes him responsible for technology innovation and strategy at Sprint, including its network architecture and standards, network and spectrum planning, and other areas.

This story was originally published June 23, 2015 at 1:32 PM with the headline "Sprint chief technology officer Stephen Bye is resigning."