My Journey at Meta

My journey at Meta came to an end this Wednesday, as I was impacted by the layoffs. I just wanted to make a brief post summarizing the positive experience that I had at Meta and on my team, and also leave some words of encouragement for anyone else in the industry who may have been impacted recently.

I worked on the Facebook Marketplace, Recommendation & Delivery Infrastructure team; we build the ranking infrastructure to very quickly rank Facebook Marketplace feeds. I am proud to have shipped a local model management framework for our Ranker system. This is important because we started moving to local machine learning models in order to reduce latency, by saving the round trip latency typically associated with making a network machine learning model request. As we increased to hundreds of locally served machine learning models (local meaning loaded on the production servers), the models take more RAM on servers with fixed memory capacities (e.g. 32 GB, 64 GB). I designed and implemented a framework that sets a memory budget for each local model use case, and prioritizes the loading of production models over experiment models in order to stay under that budget.

Outside of engineering, I loved meeting people. I met so many intelligent, motivated people at Meta. Not just software engineers, but also people from other disciplines like tax, data science, facilities. Whoever I met, I always had the feeling that they were at the top of their game and one of the best in the industry in their field. One of my favorite things was going to the group fitness classes - I went to 2 or 3 every week. There, I met a number of friends who I plan to stay in touch with. I would also promote the classes to teammates and coworkers, and we were able to get several people from the Marketplace Infra org to go to the same workout classes!

For others who were impacted by Meta layoffs or other layoffs, my heart goes out to you. Layoffs are unexpected; they scare us and force us to have to go back onto the job market when many others are competing for jobs. I have tried to keep an optimistic mindset: a door has closed, and another door has opened. There is some awesome opportunity out there for you and I want you to go for it and I hope you get it!