At Facebook, engineers work in an environment where innovation, technology and social impact intersect every day. Here are some examples of Facebook teams moving fast and building cool products to connect the world.
Facebook New York is one location that is growing rapidly across all disciplines: product design, research, data science, analytics – but especially engineering. This is one of the locations where teams get to work on projects with the potential to touch a billion people, while having a social impact. Recently, the team launched a feature that lets people connect fundraiser pages directly to a Facebook Live, displaying a donate button and fundraiser progress on the live video. The feature helps people raise money for the causes they care about more easily.
The Social Recommendations product also launched because of the combined efforts of multiple Facebook teams in New York, including engineering teams focused on Facebook Local Search, Recommendations and Applied Machine Learning. The product gives people a new way to capture "word-of-mouth" recommendations from friends. From travel and events to food and service recommendations, this product makes it easy to get the info you need in one convenient spot.
Ideas like the fundraising button on Facebook Live and Social Recommendations come from agile, fast-moving team work.
Facebook Seattle is also a dynamic hub for engineers, and one of the largest engineering centers for the company outside of Menlo Park. With an eye toward helping people stay connected anywhere in the world, the teams built Messenger Lite, a standalone version of Messenger for Android that offers the core features of Messenger for places with slower than average internet speeds.
Teams work together in open workspaces to iterate on innovations like Messenger Lite and beyond.
In Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters, teams built Community Help, a feature that lives in Safety Check where locals can offer assistance to people nearby, by offering things like baby supplies, water, or a room in their home. People affected by a local disaster can search through these categorized posts and connect with providers over Messenger.
Engineer Peter Cottle speaking about Community Help, a new feature in Safety Check
The Pride rainbow profile photo overlay on Facebook was also a project that originated in the company’s Menlo Park offices. During a hackathon two interns worked on the tool, originally meant for employees, but because of its popularity, it was pushed globally to the public in 72-hours.
When Facebook engineers are empowered to solve social problems in the way Facebook approaches all problems – by being bold and moving fast – the opportunities are limitless, whether it is enabling social cause–related fundraising to connecting people to resources in times of crisis and much more.
For those who excel in a workplace that encourages its people to make an immediate social impact from day one, check out the Facebook careers site.
