[Updated 8/30/17, 12:30 pm, with comment from Facebook.] Facebook is reportedly planning to go on a hiring spree in the Boston area.
The giant social networking company, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, intends to move into a new office in Cambridge, MA, next year and add more than 500 local employees, the Boston Globe reported. That would bring Facebook’s local staff to around 650 people, according to the Globe.
The new office will span the top three floors of 100 Binney St., a new Kendall Square building expected to open next year that will also house a few hundred employees of the pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb, the Globe reported.
In an e-mail to Xconomy, Facebook confirmed it has signed a lease for space at 100 Binney St. that can accommodate up to 650 employees. [This paragraph added.]
Facebook opened its Cambridge office four years ago. It was a bit of a homecoming for the tech company, which Mark Zuckerberg co-founded in 2004 while he was a student at Harvard. Facebook later moved to the Bay Area; its headquarters are currently located in Menlo Park, CA.
Ryan Mack, Facebook Boston’s site lead, told Xconomy in October that the local engineering office is mainly working on computing infrastructure projects related to security, data storage, networking, and compilers, which translate programs into machine code. The practical applications are things like enabling Internet access and delivering video content.
Mack told the Globe that the Facebook Boston team will also be working on machine learning technologies and hardware.
Facebook isn’t the only big tech company headquartered elsewhere that is expanding its Boston-area presence. Seattle-based Amazon recently announced plans to hire 900 people at a new Boston office opening next year, which would reportedly bring its employee count in Boston and Cambridge to around 2,000 people. [Disclosure: The author’s significant other is employed by Amazon in Boston.]
