Today, Facebook (META 0.46%) announced it would be officially opening an office in Boston. The site will be near Harvard, which is where CEO Mark Zuckerberg founded the social network in 2004.
In a post by Ryan Mack, the "site lead" for Facebook Boston, on the official Facebook Boston page, he noted that in the buildup to reach almost 1.2 billion users, the company has "faced some unprecedented engineering and infrastructure challenges to get to this point, and now we're facing a whole new set." Noting that as a result of this "[w]e're going to need even more help to meet those new challenges, so we've decided to start building a new engineering team in Boston."
Facebook Boston will represent the company's fifth engineering team, with the other four located in Menlo Park, Calif., (where Facebook is currently headquartered), Seattle, New York, and London. Mack noted that choosing Boston to be the company's fifth engineering location was "an easy choice" thanks to a "world-class" tech community, expansive top-tier academic institutions (Boston is also home to MIT and other schools), the "vibrant start-up ecosystem," and the array of global institutions that are located in Boston.
There was no mention as to exactly how many people would be employed in the Facebook office in Boston, but simply that the "team will start small, and will focus on challenging new infrastructure projects in areas like networking, storage, security, and language runtimes."
