Here at Facebook Tel Aviv, we pride ourselves on hiring engineering managers who promote a healthy, proactive, and autonomous teams. We spoke with Yuval K., Engineering Manager for Facebook Lite, to discuss why Facebook Israel is the perfect place for him, how he manages his team, and what the Facebook Lite team does to enable technological opportunities around the world—regardless of economic status.

“Facebook has always been one of my favorite services. I wanted to build products that my friends and family actually use, so I was thrilled when I was offered a role at Facebook in Menlo Park. When my daughter was born, it was important to us that she could grow up close to our family and friends in Israel, but I didn’t want to leave my career with Facebook behind. Luckily, I was given the opportunity to move back to Israel and join the Facebook Lite team as an engineering manager.”

“At Facebook Lite, our goal is to provide the best Facebook experience possible for people with low-end devices or poor network conditions. The app is optimized and lightweight, but it still provides the full Facebook experience. Today, our app gives hundreds of millions of people access to communities when they wouldn’t otherwise have it. It’s rewarding and exciting to be a part of a team that helps people build communities and enables economic opportunity at a global scale.”

“One of the reasons I’ve stayed with Facebook for almost seven years is because of our “bottom up” culture. As an engineering manager, and even when I was an engineer, I’ve always felt fully accountable for the strategy and roadmap of my team—not just the execution. I’ve had many conversations with leaders across the industry outside of Facebook, and I’ve discovered that in some other places you don’t have the same amount of influence on product strategy. Instead, it’s top down from the management team or from an external product management team.”

“At Facebook, we have strong collaboration between product managers, engineers, product designers, data scientists and a lot of other roles. When we say the word ‘team,’ we don’t just mean engineers—we mean all the people who are accountable for making the Facebook Lite app better. And all these people are sitting together on the same floor, working shoulder to shoulder, to accomplish our goals.”

“Every member of my team is incredibly skilled, so I don’t have to micromanage, or know exactly what they’re doing each day. This is a liberating experience as a manager. I’ve been able to focus more on growing new tech leads, coming up with new initiatives for Facebook, and finding new opportunities to improve the health of my team. There are so many ways you can invest your time if you can be proactive instead of reactive, and it’s much more satisfying to come to work every day.”