Facebook has opened its new London headquarters on Monday and said it would add 800 more jobs in the capital next year.
The social media giant said more than half of the people working at the site in central London will focus on engineering, making it Facebook’s biggest engineering hub outside the United States.
TheNewsGuru reports the London office will also house Facebook’s first in-house start-up incubator, called LDN_LAB, designed to help kick-start fledgling British digital businesses.
Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook’s EMEA Vice President, said the social network was more committed than ever to the UK and supporting the growth of the country’s innovative startups.
“The UK’s flourishing entrepreneurial ecosystem and international reputation for engineering excellence makes it one of the best places in the world to build a tech company,” she said.
“And we’ve built our company here – this country has been a huge part of Facebook’s story over the past decade, and I look forward to continuing our work to achieve our mission of bringing the world closer together,” he further stated.
The new jobs, which come 10 years after the company set up its first London office, will take Facebook’s total British workforce to more than 2,300 by the end of 2018, it said.
Facebook’s new office in the capital’s West End, designed by architect Frank Gehry, will house engineers, developers, marketing and sales teams working on products like Workplace, its business product which was built in London, it said.