Facebook opens new London office, says it will add another 800 jobs next year; the investment makes London Facebook's biggest engineering hub outside the US
LONDON (Reuters) - Facebook opened its new London office on Monday and said it would add another 800 jobs in the capital next year …
Context & Ripple Effects
This opening completes a promise made a year ago, when Facebook said it would grow UK headcount by 50% alongside the new headquarters (a 500-person hiring pledge for 2017). Today's announcement goes further: another 800 roles next year, enough to make London the company's largest engineering site outside the United States.
Facebook is not expanding into a vacuum. Months earlier, Amazon committed to nearly doubling its own London R&D operation from 450 to 900 people (as part of a push toward 24K UK staff), so the two largest US platforms are now scaling engineering in the same city at the same time.
First-order effects
- Facebook adds 800 London engineering jobs next year on top of the 500 pledged for 2017, and the new office immediately becomes its biggest engineering hub outside the US.
Second-order effects
- Amazon's parallel London R&D expansion turns the city into a two-horse contest for the same engineering talent, pressuring salaries and forcing both firms to keep announcing hiring rounds to signal momentum.
- The enlarged office gives Facebook room to spin up adjacent programs on-site — within weeks of opening it launched its first in-house incubator, LDN_LAB, inside the same building.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, London consolidates as the default non-US engineering base for US consumer-internet platforms, with each successive hiring commitment (Facebook's later 1,000-worker UK plan among them) resetting the scale competitors must match to claim presence there.
- A large permanent engineering footprint also creates a base for product-specific bets beyond core ads work, as seen when Facebook later chose London for its WhatsApp payments push.
The trend: US consumer-internet platforms are concentrating their largest non-US engineering operations in London, with each hiring round raising the scale rivals must match.