Facebook chooses London for first non-US engineering base
Facebook is hiring engineers for a new team based in London, the company announced on Wednesday.
It will be Facebook's first engineering centre outside the US. The news will bolster London's growing reputation as a tech hub, given Amazon's revelation just this week that it is establishing a global digital media development base in the city.
According to Facebook software engineer Philip Su, London is "a perfect fit for Facebook engineering".
"It's a global hub, and it has a vibrant local start-up community with lots of great technical talent. Our team in London will start small, focusing on building a core of great engineers, and then grow over time and eventually focus on building products in key areas like mobile and platform," Su wrote.
"Our engineers in London — like those in Menlo Park, New York, and Seattle — will be able to pursue great ideas and ship products quickly," he added, while directing readers of the blog post to a new profile page for Facebook London.
Facebook's London offices, where the new engineers will work, are in Covent Garden. As with Amazon, which is siting its new offices near the Barbican, Facebook has chosen not to put its base in the so-called Silicon Roundabout area.
A careers page for the Covent Garden offices currently lists 22 open positions, although only seven are engineering-related.
The move comes in a crucial week for Facebook, which will present its first results as a public company on Thursday.