We recently caught up with Dolapo F, an engineering manager who works on AR out of our London office. Learn more about Dolapo including his inspiration to study engineering, his current work, and what keeps him busy during a typical day at Facebook.

I'm an Engineering Manager on the AR Studio. Our team builds an authoring tool for creating AR experiences for the Camera Effects Platform.

I've always been interested in computers since I was first introduced to them. My father was a professor of history and he had a university-issued Mac that he used for his work. When he wasn't working, I loved playing around with hypercard to build small things. What really pushed me over the edge was my first Texas Instruments calculator in high school, the TI-83. Discovering that you could write little programs for that calculator really got me into programming. I loved playing around with TI-BASIC and spent my weekends porting games over to the calculator instead of studying. I eventually decided to pursue a computer engineering degree in university.

The product I work on is attempting to expose the power of our machine learning and computer vision tech to creative people who do not necessarily need to understand how it all works. A lot of these paradigms are new so we have to orient the team towards moving quickly, learning from users, and iterating. As a result we tend to target quick release sprints and we work very closely with product managers, researchers, and designers to build software. We're also fortunate that we have an art team in-house that we can work with on new features.

We're working on a number of features to provide more of Facebook's computer vision and machine learning tech to unlock more creativity for artists. Some of the projects I'm most excited about fall into this category.

I spend my days on a mix of trying to make progress on my projects and enabling engineers on my team to make progress on their goals. At least that's how it starts. I actually try to organize my days into blocks of 1:1 meetings, team meetings, cross-functional meetings, and personal work time. However, there is that cliche about how no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. In reality, I also have to be reactive to whatever the team or product needs. Facebook can be a very dynamic and some might say chaotic place at times.

We are making contributing towards making the world more connected by enabling people to share what is interesting and relevant to them. A lot of what we do is about expression and allowing people to share in visually interesting ways.

One of the things that motivated me to apply to Facebook was the opportunity to work on products that reach over 2 billion people. I still get a large amount of fulfillment from seeing my work make a meaningful impact on so many people's lives. What has kept me here is the wealth of opportunity to work with talented people on incredibly challenging problems.

Join our engineering team, check out open roles here.