Facebook Is Hiring 5 New Staff Members for Its Blockchain Team

Facebook is hiring.

The social media giant now has five job openings for blockchain talent at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters in the areas of data science, software engineering and marketing.

While the firm's possible plans for blockchain have not yet been revealed, the ads on its careers pages state that the ultimate goal is to help “billions of people with access to things they don't have now.” It further cites “equitable financial services, new ways to save, or new ways to share information” as some potential use cases for the tech.

Facebook launched its blockchain team in May, with the reported aim of exploring the emerging technology. The team is headed by David Marcus, who had previously served as the company’s vice president of its Messenger app division. In June, the firm appointed one of its senior engineers, Evan Cheng, as its first “director of engineering, blockchain.”

In the ads, Facebook said that the blockchain division has been set up as a startup within the firm, and has the aim of making blockchain technology work at scale within the company.

For its data-focused roles, there are openings for a data scientist and a data engineer, with some of the requirements being described as quantitative analysis expertise, "informing solutions with a variety of data," making product decisions and "building models of user behaviors for analysis or to power production systems."

Facebook is also looking for two blockchain software engineers "who share a passion for tackling complexity and building platforms that can scale through multiple orders of magnitude,” one post reads.

A product marketing lead is also sought “to build and manage a new product marketing team focused in exploring the opportunity the blockchain will bring.” Perhaps indicating that Facebook is now considering more than merely exploring blockchain use cases, they must also manage the firm's "product go-to-market plans."

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