More than 1.5 billion people in over 180 countries use WhatsApp to stay in touch with friends and family, anytime and anywhere. In fact, a million end-to-end encrypted messages are sent via WhatsApp every two seconds.

To get a better sense of what it’s like to work on a product that enables communication for people all over the world — even those in low-bandwidth areas who are coming online for the first time — we sat down with a few team members to hear about their experiences firsthand.

“I’ve been with WhatsApp for over six years, and every day is just as exciting as the first. Working on an app used by so many people around the world gives me the opportunity to work cross-functionally with teams across the globe. Not to mention, knowing that our small but global team enables people in more than 180 countries to connect with their loved ones is a powerful feeling. So naturally, when I was offered the opportunity to move to London from the U.S. to help grow the Client Automation team in the heart of a beautiful new city, I couldn’t pass it up. My team is small, but quickly growing, and we handle automated testing and content generation across all WhatsApp clients and over 50 languages. We work super fast and on lots of different projects, and there’s a real sense of camaraderie. WhatsApp London has a real startup feel; but we’re still part of Facebook, so we have the resources and perks of a larger company. It feels like every day we have someone visiting from our headquarters in Menlo Park, or one of us is traveling out there, which helps us maintain a strong connection. If you thrive in a startup environment and want to be part of a quickly growing team with big impact, there’s no better time to join WhatsApp London.”

"WhatsApp is very personal for me; it's the only app my grandfather uses. I feel especially proud to be able to make a direct, positive impact on his life as well as the lives of so many people across the globe. WhatsApp is the "internet" for large parts of the world. The scalability, reliability and performance problems we are solving are incredibly challenging and rewarding. We are continuing to add value for people through new features, and at the same time, we've been fighting abuse on the platform using innovative machine learning algorithms.

We are taking a fresh look at our distributed infrastructure, building a new network, storage and container solutions. We also continue to add value for users through features such as Status (biggest stories product in the world) and business products that make it easier for people to communicate with local businesses. Our engineering team is growing and there are a lot of opportunity to make a difference at WhatsApp and in the world."

"I joined WhatsApp because I was offered the opportunity to lead a brand-new initiative. No one at WhatsApp had touched the enterprise side of the business before, and it was incredibly exciting to work on something completely new. The value we bring by enabling rich, real-time communication between customers and businesses is extremely promising. The challenge is to monetize while providing good experiences for customers and businesses that use our tools.

Our people take responsibility for the projects they work on; there is so much to learn from the engineers here. It’s important for any company to have a solid foundation of people able to do the work they want, and I am grateful to work with some of the smartest and the most passionate engineers in the industry."

"I've worked at WhatsApp for almost a decade, and right now, I'm working on improving voice messages and video calls on Android and iPhone for more than 1.5 billion users around the world. We recently added Voice Message Lock, which makes it easy to record long voice messages without holding down the record button the entire time. We've also made an exciting update to WhatsApp video calls on Android and desktop with Picture-in-Picture, which allows you to watch a video while continuing the conversation, even in another chat. Among other fun things we build, I recently drew my first sticker pack, called Salty.

I build products because I can be creative, do what I love, and produce something meaningful at the same time. At WhatsApp, we never sacrifice quality for quantity, and we design and build things in the most intuitive and reliable way possible. We have a great responsibility to provide an essential service to one-fifth of the world population, which is why we’re looking for people who truly care and are ready to put forward their best effort."