DURHAM, N.C. (WGHP) — North Carolinians love social media more than any other state, according to a study, and it looks like social media—or at least Meta—might just love the state back.
On Monday, WRAL reported that the company Meta, headed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has laid out plans for a "significant presence" in Durham with job listings already appearing online. Meta is the parent company of multiple social media and communication platforms, including Facebook which draws in about 2.91 billion active users a month according to Omnicore Agency.
“The announcement by Meta of their intention to open an office in Durham is yet another indication that this is the most desirable city in the United States,” Durham Mayor Pro Tempore Mark-Anthony Middleton told WRAL in a written statement. “Our highly educated population resulting from NCCU, Duke and Durham Public Schools coupled with our art, food and cultural scene should leave no one surprised by this decision.
“However, we also know that this will present a not so unique set of challenges to push for safeguards against gentrification and to ensure the participation of native Black and Brown Durhamites in the growing wealth of our city.”
The company did not reveal any more details about the plan or what aspect of the company the new facility may focus on.
About the jobs
As of Wednesday, Meta had listings on Indeed for four Durham-based positions: content designer, product designer, enterprise engineer and enterprise engineering manager.
The "content designer" role is to "design and deliver product flows, new features, in-product messaging, content frameworks, navigation, product naming and more for all platforms, including mobile, desktop, AR/VR, hardware and voice." They are looking for applicants with seven or more years of experience in "writing and designing content for web or mobile product experiences."
The "product designer" is "a central role in the way we build products, ensuring our products and features are valuable for people, easy to use and of the highest level of craft and execution." The company is looking for applicants with two or more years of experience in building and shipping applications or software, prototyping and visual design.
The "enterprise engineer" works on building "industry leading, highly intuitive software that underpin business functions across Supply Chain, Finance, Sales, Marketing, E-commerce and Security." They're looking for someone with five or more years of experience building systems in Java, PHP, C++ or JavaScript technologies and working with code bases "building micro services, REST APIs, GraphQL."
The "enterprise engineering manager" is expected to lead a team of engineers and product managers to develop software "to streamline and automate critical business processes." They are looking for applicants with experience building enterprise software and working with programming languages like Java, PHP, Python or C++.
The listings do not include pay ranges.
About Meta
While Meta is most known for Facebook, the company does a lot more than that. The company launched Facebook Chat in 2008, which would later develop into its instant messaging platform Messenger in 2014. The company also acquired Instagram in 2012 and both WhatsApp and the virtual reality system Oculus in 2014.
These products center around the idea of virtual communication which gave rise to the company's rebrand from Facebook to Meta in December, a nod to the term "metaverse" coined by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in 1992.
According to the Associated Press, Zuckerberg describes the "metaverse" as a "virtual environment," a three-dimensional digital world in which you can work and play independently and with others.
Victoria Petrock, an analyst who follows emerging technologies, described the concept to the AP as "the next evolution of connectivity where all of those things start to come together in a seamless, doppelganger universe, so you’re living your virtual life the same way you’re living your physical life."
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