Facebook launches office in Cambridge

Nine years after Facebook got its start in a Harvard dorm room, the social network is back in Cambridge.

Facebook Inc. has opened an engineering office in Kendall Square, in the heart of the area’s growing tech community and in the same neighborhood where other West Coast software giants Amazon.com Inc. and Twitter Inc. have recently established beachheads, The Boston Globe reported.

The office will give a permanent home to a handful of Facebook employees in the area who have been working remotely, and provide more room for a growing number of local employees. Facebook refused to provide details on the size of its office or on how many employees it plans on hiring.

The Globe’s Scott Kirsner reported in August that Facebook was moving into a Kendall Square office, but the company has not confirmed the office until now.

“We are in Boston because there is really great, deep technical talent, and great start-up culture,” said Ryan Mack, who will lead the Boston team for Facebook. “This is just a really exciting time to be in Cambridge and Kendall Square, in particular.”

As Facebook’s size has ballooned to 1.2 billion users, its needs for engineering brain power are growing, said Mack. “We really have to invest heavily in hiring really strong talent.”


Facebook’s Cambridge outpost will focus on some of the company’s harder engineering challenges such as networking, storage, and security issues. It is Facebook’s fifth engineering office, including the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.


Even though Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard University and fled to California to grow the company, the social network has maintained strong ties to the local area. It has recruited heavily at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but until now most hires were relocated to California or one of the company’s other offices.