Earlier today, a Business Insider report indicated that Tumblr has landed a &''very big and competitive&'' new round of funding from Sequoia Capital. We&'re still looking into that, and they&'re not commenting, but here&'s one thing we do know about the company: they&'ve just hired a new Director of Product.

Derek Gottfrid will be joining the company from The New York Times where he was the Senior Architect in charge of many of the interesting things they do with technology. It looks like today isa4s��his last day of work for the Times, and he&'ll be joining team Tumblr shortly, Tumblr President John Maloney confirms. &''We&'re thrilled and excited about what Derek will bring to the team/product,&'' Maloney writes in an email. Gottfrid had been with the Times for 12 years.

The move continues the recent trend of Tumblr hiring from old media companies, as back in August they hired Mark Coatney away from Newsweek to be their media evangelist.

In terms of growth, Tumblr continues to be on a tear. They publish all their numbers publicly via Quantcast, and the growth rate is pretty amazing. Back in July, we reported they were doing 1.5 billion pageviews a month �a4���a4� that number is now past 2.5 billion, with half of those coming from the U.S. They&'re about to become a top 40 site in the U.S. In August, they shot past a billion total posts.

Given the growth and assuming the funding talk is true, expect the New York-based Tumblr to begin ramping up hiring shortly. Their staff blog only shows 12 employees, and one of them, co-founder and CTO, Marco Arment left in September to work on his successful side-project, Instapaper.

Tumblr last raised money in April of this year. They&'ve raised just over $10 million in total so far leading up to this new funding.