Facebook has announced plans to open an engineering unit in London, its first outside the US.
"London is a perfect fit for Facebook engineering – it’s a global hub, and it has a vibrant local startup community with lots of great technical talent," Facebook software engineer Philip Su wrote in a company blog post.
"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.
There are five open software development positions in London listed on Facebook’s jobs page. These include a manager, two mobile development positions and one role working on Facebook’s Open Graph platform.
Facebook’s London office is based in Covent Garden.
The news follows the announcement by online retailer Amazon.com that it will open a new ‘Digital Media Development Centre‘ in London’s Barbican area. The new centre will house Pushbutton, a UK-based digital development agency it acquired last year, and the development resources of LoveFilm, the online film rental service that Amazon.com also bought in 2011.
Neither announcement represents huge new investment in UK engineering talent. Amazon.com, for one, is simply relocating employees already based in the capital.
Nevertheless, they demonstrate that efforts to promote London as a source of technical talent have proved successful.
