I joined Facebook 6 years ago and worked on an emerging market product throughout those 6 years. I started on Facebook for Every Phone which was a Facebook product for feature phones (non-smart phones) and shifted to the android world with Facebook Lite.

Facebook Lite is a native android app that allows people with limited connectivity and low end devices to use Facebook. The app uses a unique technology stack that optimized data usage and device resource usage to give a good Facebook experience on every android device. Launched in June 2015, it reached 100 million monthly active people by March which makes it the fastest Facebook app to reach 100 million.

Starting as a backend focused engineer I worked on integrating the Facebook for Every Phone product into Facebook's infrastructure. When the integration was done, I switched my focus to making Facebook for Every Phone be a better product, I improved messaging and worked on improving the news feed experience, making the product very engaging.

During 2014 I spent 5 months in the Facebook Vancouver office building a team of 5 newly recruited engineers working on Facebook for every phone as well as the mobile web site. During the time I completed my transition from a software engineer to engineering manager.

When I went back to MPK the opportunity to build an android solution for low end devices on limited networks was there and together with the Facebook for every phone team we started building what will become Facebook Lite.

During 2015 I decided to move back to Israel and be a part of the great office here, Facebook Lite is now the largest team in the Tel Aviv office, and I'm very excited to see the team and the office grow further.

I built two apps that connected hundreds of millions people to each other using Facebook. It has an APK that is less than 1 MB in size, meaning people can download it in seconds on slow connections. The app now supports 56 languages and is most popular in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and the Philippines. When the system you built handles over 1 million likes per minute, you handle a very different scale of problem and that is very exciting.

The office is small which makes working in it very collaborative. The fact that there is a focus on emerging markets combined with the fact that I know most of the engineers makes it a great environment for developing big scale, highly complex products.

Facebook mission is to make the world more open and connected.

Our day to day work in Tel Aviv relate directly to the part of the world that gets the least attention. We are working to make sure people in Africa, in Asia and Latin America get access to the internet and get a great Facebook experience on their phones.

I joined Snaptu when it was a startup and when the acquisition happened, I saw this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to take an application to Facebook scale, using state of the art tools and infrastructure.

We keep in close touch with engineers in all major Facebook offices, I have weekly meetings with engineers in London and Menlo Park as well as syncs with engineers in New York and Seattle.

Working on Facebook Lite which is a large product, allows me to collaborate with many teams inside the company and increase the impact Facebook Lite has on the world.

My mentors are people that previously worked in startups and now drive huge impact in the Facebook environment. Barak Naveh and Micha Berdichevsky who founded Snaptu years ago and made a very successful mobile product before the android era are still in Facebook, building inspiring initiatives that helps Facebook step up to the next level.

Having such entrepreneurial spirit inside the company makes sure we take risks and innovate which is a big part of the Facebook culture.