People around the world come to Instagram every day to get closer to the people and things they love—whether that’s a playful puppy, vibrant artwork, celebrities, celebrations like Pride, or a movement as big as #BlackLivesMatter. We’re constantly inspired by the way people express themselves on Instagram, and our headquarters in Menlo Park is where this inspiration comes to life.

It’s important to us that our teams can have fun and enjoy the magic of Instagram for themselves. That’s why we have “creation areas” for impromptu photo ops, and ‘grammable workspaces like our airy library. At the same time, IG MPK is home to some of the most critical work we’re doing right now as a company. We have teams here who are working tirelessly to ensure the Instagram community remains the safest, most welcoming, and kindest community for the one billion people who use it. After all, if people don’t feel safe on the platform, they won’t feel confident expressing themselves. And if it’s not on Insta, did it even happen?

Leading the charge on these efforts is our Well-Being team, which includes diverse talent across infrastructure, security, product, and machine learning. Our engineers focus on platform abuses like spam, account takeovers, ad fraud, payment fraud and more; as well as supporting people with mental health resources when they need them most. This meaningful work impacts all Instagram products—including Profile, Direct, IGTV, Stories and more—and includes cross-functional collaboration with teams around the world, from Seattle to London.

IG MPK is growing fast, and we’re hiring for many roles on our Well-Being team. We’re especially looking for talented engineers to join the fight to keep our community safe and secure. Skills in data analysis, training and deploying machine learning models, and/or a background in infrastructure using or designing APIs that can collect user activity and signals in a scalable way are of particular interest.

To get a better sense of what people can expect from working at IG MPK, we sat down with a few team members.

“The Well-Being team exists to make Instagram the safest, kindest and most supportive community in the world. The problems we’re tackling, like spam and harassment, have a huge impact on people's ability to confidently express themselves. Beyond dealing with bad actors, we’re aiming to foster a community at Instagram where people support each other with kindness and empathy. My team recently worked on an anonymous reporting feature for Instagram Live. If you're watching a live broadcast and see someone going through a difficult time, such as talking about hurting themselves, you can report it anonymously. The person will see a pop-up message with options to talk to a helpline, reach out to a friend or get other tips and support.

On our team, there’s always a new challenge to work on. As the techniques bad actors use become more sophisticated, we in turn have to change and adapt our strategies and tools to prevent those people from harming our community. Our team of engineers is learning so much, so fast, that every six months it almost feels like we’re in new roles. But at the end of the day, we're on this team because we want to support our community and make it a safe and positive place for everyone.”

“Many people don’t think about the security of their account until something goes wrong. My team is working behind-the-scenes to ensure there is a strong infrastructure in place that will keep our system protected from bad actors, like hackers. We recently took security a step further with support for third-party authenticator apps to log in to Instagram, in addition to the two-factor authentication we already had in place. This step helps provide an even safer environment for our community.

Before I joined the team, I worked at a startup that moved really fast. I thought a bigger company like Facebook might be different; but Facebook moves even faster! There's no hierarchy or politics—you can talk to and work with anyone, no matter their level. The other big reason I enjoy building at Instagram is experiencing how much people love our product; when they talk about it, they light up with a smile. Our team is growing fast and I’m proud to work with kind and supportive people who care about our community as much as I do. I want to let engineers interested in joining Instagram know to not be afraid of what they don’t know—just come build with us and you will make an impact.”

“I spend my days tackling challenges related to abuse detection on Instagram, where our ultimate goal is to keep the community safe and secure. We don’t want to be reactive and wait for bad things to happen before developing a solution—we want to protect people from the start. Working on integrity is exciting because Instagram is constantly building new features, so even if you’ve worked on a similar problem before, it feels new. When you join there’s a lot to learn; but if you demonstrate that you care about something and want to solve it, you’re empowered to run with it. A lot of our best projects were big bets that leadership supported, and that people chose to take on because they were passionate about the idea.

At the end of the day, everyone cares about the work they're doing, more than I’ve experienced at any other company. We all want to help our community have the safest and most positive experience possible.”

“I work to make sure the content posted to the platform is not only safe, but it’s diverse and promotes a healthy community. We’ve focused on building and adapting our machine learning models to fit the needs of different teams, working with them cross-functionally to understand how we can ensure our products are secure. Being based in Menlo Park gives us the opportunity to collaborate and connect with a variety of teams on the ground.

One of the things that surprised me most when I joined Instagram is how decisions are made from the bottom to the top. Engineers are empowered to make decisions, and suggestions we make are addressed quickly by leadership. I was also in awe that the company has so many talented people working under one roof. I've worked with a variety of companies through internships, but at Instagram, I have the most incredible teammates.

Ultimately, we want people to be able to use Instagram to learn and grow in their community without having to worry about any security concerns or inappropriate content. Instagram is pretty special—it’s focused on young people, and we want to make sure this is a good place for them. We’re creating a product for the future generation.”