Facebook's latest engineering team hotspot: Boston

Summary: Reiterating the constant technical challenges in supporting a growing network of 1.19 billion users and counting, the new site lead declared Boston was "an easy choice."

Much like its international datacenter roadmap, Facebook is slowly but surely expanding its intellectual wealth and manpower on a geographic level.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company is in the midst of opening another engineering office -- this time in Boston -- proving that Silicon Valley isn't the only hotspot for developers and engineers these days.

Ryan Mack, an infrastructure engineer who built much of the backend for Facebook's Timeline profile interface, will be the site lead in Massachusetts.

Reiterating the constant technical challenges in supporting a growing network of 1.19 billion users and counting, Mack explained in a blog post on Thursday morning that Boston was "an easy choice."

The tech community here is world-class, from the incredible academic institutions to the vibrant startup ecosystem to the bevy of global  companies who have teams here. We are thrilled to have found a new home here and hope we can help the community continue to thrive.

Our Boston team will start small, and will focus on challenging new infrastructure projects in areas like networking, storage, security, and language runtimes.

Boston marks Facebook's fifth satellite office dedicated to engineering. Additional locations include New York City, London, Seattle, and of course, Menlo Park. Facebook also had a temporary site set up in Vancouver earlier this year.

For any engineers in the area looking for a job, Facebook will soon have job listings posted.

Topics: Web development, Apps, IT Employment, Tech Industry, Social Enterprise

Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.

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