Facebook Moves to Cambridge

Nine years after its founding, Facebook is returning to Cambridge.

On Thursday, the social networking site announced plans to install a new engineering center in Kendall Square, a few T stops away from the Harvard campus where it was first founded.

The Kendall Square office building will be Facebook’s fifth engineering site, joining sites in Menlo Park, Seattle, New York, and London.

Ryan Mack, an infrastructure engineer who contributed to the development of Facebook’s Timeline feature, will lead the Cambridge site.

“In many ways, Boston was an easy choice,” he said in a written statement that appeared on Facebook. “The tech community here is world-class, from the incredible academic institutions to the vibrant startup ecosystem to the bevy of global  companies who have teams here. We are thrilled to have found a new home here and hope we can help the community continue to thrive.”

Mack started with a small team of engineers two and a half years ago, working throughout the greater Boston area, including public workspaces such as coffee shops and libraries.  He said he now plans to expand his team and utilize the new centralized office to tackle projects including “networking, storage, security, and language runtimes.”

After a few years in Boston, Mack and his team “reached a point where it made sense to open an office and start building out,” according to Facebook spokesperson Alex Hollander. This week marks the Cambridge site’s first week up and running.

In May of 2012, Massachusetts House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo encouraged the establishment of a Facebook site in Massachusetts in a personal appeal to founder Mark E. Zuckerberg, formerly of the Harvard College class of 2006.

“I welcome the decision of Facebook, a global brand name in the realm of social media, to open an office in Massachusetts,” DeLeo said yesterday in a statement. “For almost two years, I have been talking about our efforts to encourage Facebook to have a presence here in Massachusetts, where the idea for the company was first born.”

Kendall Square, the area of Cambridge where the new office will be located, has been a hotbed of innovation since a rise in development during the early 1990s. Also home to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it has since been a burgeoning hub for startups in the technology industry.

“It’s a great acknowledgement and testament to the amazing students both at Harvard in the greater Boston community that this is a place where they’d want to bring one of their main engineering centers to involve these students in the great things they’re doing,” said Neal A. Doyle, assistant director of the Harvard Innovation Lab.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

CORRECTION: Nov. 10, 2013

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated when Facebook announced plans to install a new engineering center in Kendall Square. In fact, that announcement came on Thursday, not on Wednesday.