FACEBOOK BOSTON BRANCHING OUT,
Social media giant beefing up Cambridge office
Social media behemoth Facebook may be branching out into virtual reality, internet-beaming drones and live video, but the Silicon Valley company is counting on its Cambridge office to build the backbone of its future services.
“We’re helping engineers build faster by creating developer tools and we’re working on engineering challenges that impact the tools and features people use and interact with on Facebook,” said Ryan Mack, leader of Facebook Boston. “Our teams in Boston work on complex, technical challenges dedicated to solving some of the world’s biggest challenges in storage, compilers, security and networking.”
Facebook’s office in the heart of Kendall Square announced a 2,000-square-foot expansion last week that was aimed at creating space for more employees. The bigger office will have enough room to add about 50 more employees, bringing the office population to about 150.
Although it was founded in a Harvard dorm room, for years Facebook had no presence in Boston. But three years ago, the company turned what started as a loose collection of workers who didn’t want to leave the Bay State into a homecoming of sorts with its first Massachusetts outpost.
When it launched in Boston, Facebook said it would focus on storage, compilers for coders, security and networking. Since then, the company has worked on machine learning algorithms that help determine what shows up on a user’s news feed and improving how applications are made and run.
Mack said those are areas that Boston-based engineers know particularly well.
“We opened an office in Boston because there’s deep technical talent in the areas of engineering that we’re expanding,” he said.
One of Facebook’s most ambitious efforts is to spread internet access to the large swaths of the world without access. Through a nonprofit called internet. org, Facebook is developing networking and infrastructure that can be cheaply used and installed across the world. Part of that, Mack said, is a project being developed in Cambridge called Terragraph — a network of cheap wireless nodes installed every 200-250 meters.
Terragraph would be able to supply internet access to buildings without expensive cable installation.
The Boston office is also working on something called the Telecom Infra project, an initiative with other companies to “collaborate on the development of new technologies and reimagine traditional approaches to building and deploying telecom network infrastructure.”
Facebook has also made waves with its new Facebook Live feature, which allows users to broadcast live video.
Facebook Boston was responsible for the feature that lets viewers comment and react to the videos in real time.