Mike Schroepfer

Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering at Facebook, routinely courts engineers from Seattle to join the fast-growing social networking site at the company's headquarters in Silicon Valley. But with plans to open a new engineering office in Seattle this summer, Schroepfer said he's "really psyched" to recruit the "best of the best" right here in the Emerald City.

We chatted with Schroepfer this morning about the type of talent Facebook hopes to attract, whether Microsoft's presence had an impact on the decision and some of the bigger technical issues that engineers are working on at the world's largest social networking site. We even got a chance to ask if Facebook is simply following in the footsteps of TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington, who announced this week that he's moved from Silicon Valley to the Seattle area. Excerpts follow.

Why did you choose Seattle for your engineering office? "This really started because I personally spend a lot of my time and we spend a lot of our energy trying to find the best and the brightest engineers around the world who share our passion for building products that help real people share and collaborate with the people in the world around them that they care about. We have recruited a number of people who have ties or are from Seattle to join us here in Palo Alto, and we just realized that there was a pretty deep well of technical talent there in Seattle that we could tap into if we had a physical location there. So, it was just looking at our own recruiting processes and the people we've been interacting with, and the caliber of engineers we're looking for and we figured this was a really good way to get some more fantastic engineers to join us."

Did your partnership with Microsoft play a role in the decision to set up shop here? "No, that didn't actually play a role at all. This was a real kind of assessment of where the talent was and could work with us in a really collaborative manner here in Palo Alto. I think the fact that Microsoft also happens to be there didn't factor in this decision at all."

Will the office be based in Seattle or on the Eastside? "We are looking in the Seattle area, probably somewhere around either the west side or downtown. We are still looking at a number of spaces, but probably not the Eastside."

What sort of things will be working on in the new office? "It is hard for me to say upfront because we move really fast, and so projects change all of the time. We are looking for people in all different engineering disciplines -- from product to infrastructure to machine learning to advertising. So, a lot of this is going to depend on the actual talent that we attract in Seattle, to be honest. Our philosophy within engineering is we let people work on the projects that they have the most passion for and the most domain experience for. So, we have open projects across engineering that can be staffed up in Seattle, and that depends on who decides to join us."

Hadi Partovi

Have people already joined? "We have a set of people who are moving up from Palo Alto to Seattle. So Ari Steinberg, who is a very experienced engineer here at the company, and has been with the company a little over four years, is joining to run the office. We've announced that Hadi Partovi is going to work with us as an adviser to help us kind of set up and get the office running. And there will be another set of engineers who relocate from Palo Alto to Seattle. We don't even have our office space secured or open yet, so we are in the early stages of finding out who else is going to join us."

How many people will be in the office by the end of this year? "It is hard to say because we don't try to hit a specific number. It is a function of how many talented people decide to apply or we can find. We are getting office space that can accommodate up to about 30 people. So, within the first year or so of operation we guess it might get around that size."

Since Hadi Partovi recently left MySpace, are there any non-compete issues there? "Nothing I can comment on that. But Hadi's role is to help us, like I said, to build out the Seattle office and help Ari (Steinberg) set things up and help recruit the best of the best. Hadi has a deep network in Seattle that goes back decades from his time in many different ventures in Seattle and the Bay Area. Hadi has a lot of relationships with people here. He's an exceptionally smart guy, so honestly I am just psyched to be working with him."

What are the biggest technical hurdles facing Facebook? "The biggest is that we are now operating, with just a couple hundred engineers, one of the largest Web sites in the world. If you look at Nielsen time on site, people spend more time on Facebook than the next six Web sites combined and on that list is YouTube and Bing and Google and Amazon and a bunch of others. We are also one of the largest platform providers around, and we had our developer conference two weeks ago and announced the new Graph API and this new 'like' button that tens of thousands of Web sites have already integrated in the two weeks since we've launched it.... So, I think one of the deepest problems, is just all of the technical challenges of scaling a site of this scale and magnitude and bringing this personalized experience to people all around the world."

Any other challenges? "We have a lot of interesting challenges in machine learning and data processing in terms of how to present the best recommendations to you on your home page, for example. And a lot of what we spend our time on is consumer product design. How do we build a product that 400 plus million people all around the world can use in a way that allows them to easily share photos and meetup with family members and post on groups and build pages for all sorts of stuff. I was actually just on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, which is based out of Everett, and they have a page which they use to communicate while they are out at sea to communicate with all of the family members about what is going on on the ship. And so, you know building products that everyday people can use all of the time to communicate with the people they love is an interesting product design challenge."

So what's the real pitch you are going to give to people working at Microsoft, Amazon or Seattle startups who may be thinking about joining Facebook? "I think the short version is that you get to work on a product that hundreds of millions of people use everyday. And you get to be one of a handful of people, you know most of the stuff we've built is just a handful of people working on it, so there are a handful of people working on the world's largest photo sharing service or a handful of people working on a home page for hundreds of millions of people every day. I don't think you see the same leverage ratio -- which is the ability to touch so many people around the world with so few engineers. You can work at a bigger company that has tens of thousands of engineers that has about the same footprint as we do. We have a huge product that has a huge impact on the world, with just a couple hundred people. And you in Seattle could be the first to start our second major engineering center, and really help to drive the culture and the projects that that office works on. So, you get to be an even smaller entrepreneurial part of what I think is one of the most interesting entrepreneurial startups in the world."

So how many engineers do you actually have? "A little bit over 300 engineers at this point." (Total employment of 1,200).

You know Michael Arrington just moved to Seattle? So, we feel like we are getting a lot of love up here: "Totally coincidental.... I'll refrain from other comments." [laughs]