My experience working at Reality Labs Research, Meta

Like some of my friends who were starting around the same time, I thoroughly enjoyed bootcamp. It acted as a great transition period from college life to adulthood. I learned how to cook, how to create my own schedule, not nap every afternoon, try to get out of “work-mode” after 5PM, and not berate myself for having unproductive periods. That period of my life was easily one of the most liberating: I was in a new city, financially free to explore everything it had to offer.

Towards the end of bootcamp, candidates go through a match process (similar to residency matching). You setup your profile with your resume, skills and interests before “match day.” There’s a specific date when hiring managers start their “reach-outs” - which means exactly as it sounds. Hiring managers reach out to candidates they are most interested in, and if the interests align, candidates can move forward and start scheduling meetings with managers, peers, and tech-leads.

Keeping in touch with my manager from 2 years ago, he had given me the heads up about a new watch team that was on the rise. Working on the Facebook or Whatsapp apps didn’t excite me too much. And I’d already done a few projects during my internship days at Instagram. I was hungry for something futuristic, something that involved hardware (and perhaps something that influenced the next wave of human computing/interactions).

I knew I wanted to explore a team in the research organization because I wanted to build something from the ground up and experience what working on creating something new felt like. I also wanted to expand my breadth as a software engineer, hoping to find what I’d like to explore further along in my career. So, I started my extensive search in the internal jobs tool. Though I didn’t quite find exactly what I was looking for, I found something that fit the bill the most.

With the background and history out of the way, let’s get to the meat of the topic: being a SWE in a research org. For starters, the research organization at Meta is unique in the sense that I got to work with a diverse group of people in terms of their backgrounds. My team had physicists, neuroscientists, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, machine learning engineers, and ofcourse, software engineers. I was surrounded by people who were extremely brilliant and extremely humble at the same time. It felt magical to be around such talented individuals who were willing to turtle walk me through the most basics of concepts, regardless of how many times I’d ask.

No lunch conversation was ever dry. Bringing people from different backgrounds, upbringings, and expertise felt like bringing PIs from different fields and countries in the same room. Everyone had an opinion, everyone had deep knowledge about the most random things and everyone had humility in their way of expression.

One of the best perks of working at RLR was the biannual Reality Labs Research (RLR) Symposium. The RLR Symposium brought together all of RLR to Bellevue, Washington where Meta booked out the Meydenbauer Center for 2 days of talks followed by 2 days of demo days. It was essentially an internal conference with tight security where teams would present what they had been working on, timelines for the ambitious goals they had set, and war stories from working on challenging problems. It was electrifying to be surrounded by talented experts working in unison to innovate and potentially define the trajectory of technology for the world. It was an awesome opportunity to network, and arguably the best part of working at a big tech company: the easy access to thousands of other brilliant engineers.

Besides the RLR symposium, my org also organized its own biannual symposium in Redmond, WA. This was a smaller affair, but followed a similar structure of talks, breakout sessions and demos. The org symposium ostensibly acted as prep for the bigger symposium. Teams would use it as a trial run for their demos and talks for the main symposium. The timing of the symposia worked as deadlines during the course of the year. In the research world, it’s hard to maintain the balance between innovation with long term goals in mind and showcasing short term results. The 6 month long timelines worked as positive pressure to iterate through proof of concept and proof of experience cycles and showcase results while keeping eyes on the long term vision. Though we didn’t have product releases dictating goals, sprints and timelines, we had the luxurious symposia which were a ton of fun.