Facebook Ireland has come a long way since 2008 when the social network first announced it had chosen Dublin as the location for its international headquarters.
Having started with a small landing team of about 30 people, Facebook’s Dublin office now holds more than 1000 people working across functions such as engineering, infrastructure, safety and community operations, public policy and recruitment.
Facebook’s Irish office is responsible for users of the site outside of the US. Just 17 per cent of Facebook’s global users are in the US, while the remaining 83 per cent are serviced and managed here.
As a result, the Irish office has the largest community operations team of any Facebook office globally.
Totalling over 500 people, the community operations team is the biggest team in Dublin. It is responsible for the trust and safety of Facebook’s international users, dealing with queries about functionality or offensive content that have been reported. The team services more than one billion users per month.
The remaining employees are spread across engineering, infrastructure, social gaming, public policy, recruitment and SMB (small and medium-sized businesses).
The Dublin-based SMB team helps businesses from across Europe find new customers and grow their companies,
Facebook is a generous employer, with the average salary of its Irish workforce in the six figures, due in part to share based compensation. According to accounts filed with the Companies Registration Office, Irish employees received € 20,493 each in share payments on average in 2014. That year Facebook Ireland paid more than €62 million in wages, salaries and share based payments to its 478 staff.
Facebook’s UK staff took home an average of £210,000 in 2014, receiving more than £35 million in a share bonus scheme, but the company itself paid just £4,327 in UK corporation tax that year.
Facebook recently announced the start of construction of a €200 million data centre at Clonee on the Meath-Dublin border. The facility will provide 2,000 jobs during construction and 150 when it opens late next year or in early 2018.
