We build Facebook.
Our development cycle is extremely fast, and we've built tools to keep it that way. It's common to write code and have it running on the live site a few days later. This comes as a pleasant surprise to engineers who have worked at other companies where code takes months or years to see the light of day. If you work for us, you will be able to make an immediate impact.
As we grow, we continually face scalability challenges that no one has solved, and we successfully engineer our way through them. Already, we are the second most-trafficked PHP site in the world (Yahoo is #1), and one of the largest MySQL installations anywhere, running thousands of databases. In terms of total photo page views, we exceed all of the next largest photo sites combined. Here's a sample of the technical challenges we have overcome:
* We've built a lightweight but powerful multi-language RPC framework that allows us to seamlessly and easily tie together subsystems written in any language, running on any platform. Facebook is built in PHP, C++, Perl, Python, Erlang, Java, and even a little bit of ML—and it all works together.
* We are the largest user in the world of memcached, an open-source caching system. Originally developed by LiveJournal, we've since made so many scalability improvements and performance upgrades that we will be the primary contributor of features in the next major release.
* We've created a custom-built search engine serving millions of queries a day, completely distributed and entirely in-memory, with real-time updates.
We also are always looking for ways to harness the power of our data set in innovative ways, such as News Feed. To aid in this goal, we've opened Facebook up as a platform for external developers. Come make your ingenuity part of not just one product but potentially thousands of websites and desktop applications around the world.
