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Apr 16 2018

How I Found My Dream Startup Job at Facebook

By Meta Careers
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Over the course of 10 years, Balazs worked at 10 different companies. While he wasn’t unhappy, something kept him moving from startup to startup. He was constantly looking for the next big thing - something more meaningful and challenging, new opportunities that would make an impact - until he joined Facebook. Now, as an engineering manager, Balazs has realized that what he was missing all those years was the very thing he avoided being part of for a decade. This is his story.

Pursuing the engineer’s dream

Engineers by nature are tinkerers, innovators, and problem solvers. We have big ideas and we’re always looking to be challenged. And at some point in our career, many of us believe startups are the ideal work environment for fostering this mindset. I started my career with this belief system.
When I graduated with my Master’s Degree in Information Technology and Software Development in 2005, I was hungry and eager for opportunity. I wanted the freedom to direct my own path, build things from the ground up and inform product decisions. I wanted to learn from the best. I joined startups of all sizes, working on everything from ridesharing, to social platforms, to enterprise solutions, all in search of the next best thing. Even when my friends started to move from startups to larger companies with more job stability, I held my ground. In fact, I actively advocated against joining a larger company like Facebook; I didn’t want to be another small fish in a big pond. I wanted to be working at the forefront of innovation, and I wanted to understand what it was that made startups so special.
But about four years ago, my mindset started to shift. I was in between jobs and thought to myself, “I might as well find out what all the hype is about, and I can leave anytime I want.” I started at Facebook in September 2014, and to my surprise, what was supposed to be a three-month stint turned into the career of my dreams. I found the perfect startup environment I had been looking for over the past 10 years.

Finding my purpose at Facebook

When I started at Facebook as an Android engineer, I went through the company’s Bootcamp program, an intensive six-week curriculum designed to get engineers up-to-speed on Facebook’s code base, learn about the company culture and develop strategies for success. Bootcamp is one of the fondest memories of my career. I was working on projects, fixing bugs and building features that were pushed live into the app within the first week of the program. It was incredible to see that during my first few days at Facebook, something I built was being used by billions of people around the world.
During Bootcamp, we also got a lot of exposure to senior engineers, and we worked on projects that came from a variety of teams to help us decide which one we wanted to join. I’ll never forget the first time I met Kent Beck, inventor of extreme programming and the author of several engineering books, who created and led a program at Facebook called Good to Great coaching. He was my childhood hero, and I was completely starstruck! It was a huge moment for me. Having that kind of access to such talented and iconic people in my first few days at the company was incredibly inspiring.
Over the next year, I learned that being at Facebook, a company with roughly 10k employees - and now 25k employees - wasn’t what I thought it would be. My image of being a small fish spending my days treading water through the big pond was fading away. I wasn’t just working on mundane tasks to keep the app running; I was tackling some of the most complex problems in the world and developing technologies that were being used by over a billion people. In my previous positions, I would often check Stack Overflow to find solutions to common problems I was solving. When I started at Facebook, I tried this same approach when I was stuck, searching the web for solutions, looking at Stack Overflow, and reading articles, but I could never find the answers. I quickly realized that the problems we were trying to solve had never been solved before.
I was also surprised that Facebook gave me the freedom to follow passion projects. Early on, I participated in a hackathon in which we worked on an app called Riff that makes it easy for people to create collaborative videos. After the hackathon, my manager gave us the green light to build out the app and implement it into the product pipeline, and in just four months we launched a completely new app. We even landed some press attention! Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to work on so many meaningful projects, including Fresco, an open source image management library used by people all over the world.
Today I'm an engineering manager, where I work to develop and grow members of our infrastructure teams. I ensure team members have the tools and resources they need to take on new projects and opportunities. I often get asked how the infrastructure team makes an impact, how we are contributing to Facebook’s mission and how we continue to stay motivated. It’s true that our job is more in the background; we aren’t exporting consumer-facing features and we’re one layer removed from the product. But in many ways, our job is one of the most important roles at Facebook. We’re focused on critical elements like performance, app efficiency and scale, and ultimately, we lay the foundation that allows teams to drive forward our mission of connecting billions of people around the world.
When I look back at my career, I’ve realized the most rewarding moments have come from the past four years working at Facebook. Everything I wanted in my job at a startup - freedom to innovate, collaboration, access to senior team members and challenging projects - I’ve found here. So, if I could go back in time and give my younger self some career advice? I would say, “Join Facebook earlier.”

Listen to our Podcast with Balazs

  • Episode 5 of Inside Facebook Mobile features Balazs, who joins Mihaela and Pascal to shed some light on what it's like to be an engineering manager at Facebook. Check it out on iTunes here, Spotify here, Pocketcasts here and Google Play here.

Join our growing team!

  • We're hiring in Menlo Park, London, Seattle, New York and more! Check out engineering jobs across our teams here.

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