Facebook Eyes Engineers, Researchers For Blockchain Team

Social media giant Facebook is looking to grow its blockchain team, according to a report.

The company posted on its careers page that it’s looking for data engineers and scientists, software engineers and a product marketing lead for its blockchain team.

The company said its ultimate goal is to “help billions of people with access to things they don’t have now – that could be things like equitable financial services, it could be new ways to save, it could be new ways to share information.

“The blockchain team is a startup within Facebook, with a vision to make blockchain technology work at Facebook scale,” the ad said. “We’re exploring lots of areas of interest across all facets of blockchain technology.”

The company has been exploring blockchain use cases recently, so the announcement of its intent to expand the team was expected. Facebook already has about a dozen people working on blockchain and cryptocurrency. The team is led by former Facebook Messenger Head David Marcus, who was also previously a board member at Coinbase.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been vocal about his support of cryptocurrency and blockchain, and the potential to use them to “take power from centralized systems and put it back into people’s hands.”

In the post, Facebook laid out the tenets of the employees it is seeking.

“Facebook is seeking an experienced data engineer to join the Blockchain Data Engineering team,” the ad said. “Do you like working with data? Do you want to use data to influence product decisions for products leveraging fascinating blockchain technology? Our data engineering team works very closely with product managers, data scientists, software engineers, economic researchers, compliance and risk management to build intuitive, secure products to solve some of the most challenging problems, at a scale that few companies can match. This is technically challenging, will have massive global impact and you will get to work closely with smart folks on an intellectually challenging initiative. This is a full-time position based in our office in Menlo Park.”