Facebook Is Opening an Engineering Office in Kendall Square

Rendering via Facebook.com

Facebook, which Mark Zuckerberg famously started in a dorm at Harvard University, is bringing some of its roots back to the Boston area, citing the city’s world-class tech community that continues to grow.

“We’ve decided to start building a new engineering team,” said Ryan Mack, the site lead and engineering manager for Facebook’s Cambridge-based group, in a post called “Facebook Boston” on Thursday.

According to Mack, Facebook has “faced some unprecedented engineering and infrastructure challenges,” and they are looking for help to meet new challenges as the company takes on new projects.

Mack said in the post that he’s been working remotely in Boston for the last two years after his wife moved here to take a biotech job, but there has been no official headquarters for the group of engineers.

“I was still able to work on some amazing projects … from a series of coffee shops, libraries, and co-working spaces. At one point, a couple of us even worked out of a basement in Chinatown,” he said.

But now, the days of bouncing from spot to spot are over, and the team will be able to focus on expanding, while working under one roof in Kendall Square. In an email to Boston, a Facebook spokesperson confirmed the office is located at One Kendall Square, in the Cambridge Innovation Center.

In his post, Mack said the team will likely start out small at their home base in Cambridge, and will focus on “challenging new infrastructure projects in areas like networking, storage, security, and language runtimes.”

It will be Facebook’s fifth engineering team since the company’s launch. Other teams are stationed in Menlo Park, Seattle, New York, and London.

“Our engineering culture is incredibly important to us, so we are very deliberate when it comes to expanding that culture to new locations.But in many ways, Boston was an easy choice,” Mack said. “The tech community here is world-class, from the incredible academic institutions to the vibrant startup ecosystem to the bevy of global companies who have teams here. We are thrilled to have found a new home here and hope we can help the community continue to thrive.”