Facebook on Thursday announced the opening of its first engineering office in Boston, Mass., not far from where Mark Zuckerberg started the social network from his Harvard dorm room.
The Boston office is Facebook's fifth engineering office worldwide, joining Seattle, London, New York, and of course, Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. The Boston-based engineering team will consist of employees currently working remotely in Boston, as well as engineers the company recently hired. A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on the number of employees that will work in the office.
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In a blog post announcing the new office, Facebook engineer and office site lead Ryan Mack said that while Facebook is particular about where the company chooses to drop anchor, Boston was, for the most part, a logical fit. "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," he wrote. "We are thrilled to have found a new home here and hope we can help the community continue to thrive."
Mack and a handful of other engineers had been working remotely from coffee shops, libraries, and at one point, even a basement in the city's Chinatown district. The Boston team will "start small," wrote Mack, "and will focus on challenging new infrastructure projects in areas like networking, storage, security, and language runtimes."
The new office sits in Boston's Kendall Square area, a stone's throw from MIT and less than two miles down the road from Harvard University, where it all began.
The Boston office is not the only expansion Facebook has in the works. The company is in the process of building an addition to the Menlo Park headquarters as well, and construction is already underway. The West Campus expansion will be for engineering and product teams and is set to open sometime in 2015, according to a spokesperson.
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