The Role of a Solutions Engineer at Facebook

By Jose M. Perez, Solutions Engineer

Before joining Facebook as a Solutions Engineer, I had many questions about what the role implied, and if it was a good fit for me. After 2 years in the role, I want to share more about what we do in the hope that it may inspire you to consider an SE role.

Prior to Facebook, I had been working as a software engineer for more than 10 years, mainly building web applications. I was starting to feel that I didn’t enjoy dedicating 100% of my time to code, and wanted to understand why I was building what I was building. What kind of metrics was I trying to move? How could I validate that the project was successful? How could I iterate on it once the initial version was shipped? And, especially, how could I propose and drive projects that I thought could be valuable to the company?

I wanted to apply technology to solve business problems, and move away from seeing technology as a goal in itself. I had never heard of the Solutions Engineer role, but when people at Facebook described it to me, it was clear what gaps it was trying to solve.

Solutions Engineering at Facebook

Having worked previously building public APIs, I felt that disconnect between consumers (partners, small and large developers) and internal teams. Advocating for a technology can get you somewhere, but if you are not able to address consumers’ feedback, identify opportunities and test them, then you won’t get far.

That’s what makes the Solutions Engineer role at Facebook so unique.. We partner with companies that advertise on the family of apps (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp) and help them make sound decisions on their technical integration. This goes all the way from how they set up basic events on their website to know what actions users are performing during a purchase flow, to fully automated campaigns with dynamic creatives, audiences and bidding.

Best of all is that Solutions Engineers are Software Engineers. This might seem obvious from the job title, but it holds true on a daily basis. We spend roughly half of our time building features and products in collaboration with other Facebook teams, solving problems we have identified after working with advertisers. We identify business opportunities that can’t be addressed with our current tools, create proposals, validate them by building them ourselves, and scale these solutions. We are the ones closest to the advertiser and the best-placed to help product teams deliver successful projects to real customers.

How Is It in Practice?

Most of my colleagues have created their own companies or have worked as CTOs. And in practice, one would say we act sometimes as mini-CTOs inside the teams working with advertisers. We care about the advertiser’s challenges (e.g. increasing brand awareness, selling more products, increasing gross margin, reducing user churn) and help out using our tools.

We are not told what to do, and it is expected that we seek help from product teams, design, or marketing to propose and drive projects. And ultimately, we must prove that our solutions drove some measurable impact to both the advertiser and Facebook. All this must be done while getting access to data and tools needed to do our job. We work in an agile fashion and build minimum value products to validate our hypothesis. I must say I’m greatly surprised how smooth this works at Facebook, given the company’s humongous size.

This level of freedom and trust can be challenging at first. If you are used to being told what to do, then this is not an environment you will thrive in at first. This can be challenging but in the long term is highly rewarding. There is an expectation that you will come up with ideas, so rather than people telling you to stay within your role’s boundaries, you will see colleagues supporting you all the way.

The Solutions Engineer role is very flexible, and every one of us works differently. Some work with advertisers within a certain vertical (ecomm, retail, travel, fintech, games, and more), others within a certain region. For instance, I support advertisers in the Nordics across all verticals.

Each advertiser has its own unique challenges, and the goal is to identify how our solutions are falling short and how we can improve them, without taking shortcuts. Every new project adds complexity: more code to maintain, more products to support users with, a bigger surface prone to bugs. That’s why we align with other Solutions Engineers working to identify similar problems with the advertisers they work with, and help build a case for a project that doesn’t solve a specific limitation for a company, but can scale. Ultimately, the products we develop can be used by businesses of all sizes, and we rarely build solutions that can only be applied to large companies.

Interested in joining? We have open positions, both full-time and internships, for Solutions Engineers.