How do you deliver unrivaled infrastructure to connect the world?

That’s not just a meaty question — it also happens to be the mission of the Infrastructure Supply Chain, Sourcing and Operations Engineering (SOE) organization, a team that is primed for further growth. SOE plays a major role within the infrastructure business unit at Meta, and women are leading the charge behind its successful initiatives and business innovations.

Ese I., who describes herself as a “recovering finance operations professional,” is currently a Manager for Supply Chain Operations.

With experience in various industries, Ese is no stranger to leading large-scale projects. She currently heads an initiative to refine and optimize network infrastructure payment processes and tooling.

According to Ese, “Improving processes, reducing invoice volume and implementing new expense management tools will help scale and improve business for many cross-functional teams.”

Along with this initiative, Ese is involved with a workforce strategy program for SOE sourcing managers and the internal Service Delivery team. They build and leverage various tools that enable Meta’s workforce to be more productive and strategic, operational productivity and efficiency at scale.

For Ese, leadership circles and resource groups are a source of inspiration. “These groups are a critical resource at Meta. They bring together people from across the company to grow and reinvigorate our diverse populations by providing professional programming that supports specific development needs. Personally, the resources groups for Black in Tech and Women in Infrastructure — a resource group designed to serve the infrastructure, security and enterprise engineering communities within Meta — have allowed me to connect and learn from other people who work at Meta that are outside of my organization,” she says. “And outside of work, my family is my true North Star.”

“I'm highly motivated when I’m working on projects where you can see a direct impact to the business,” says Geri J., a Category Sourcing Manager within the SOE organization.

“Working at Meta over the last two years has given me exposure to a variety of different projects within sourcing,” she continues. “I've worked with technical teams to source value-engineered options. I've worked with suppliers to streamline our purchasing strategy and leverage our buying power, and I've worked on projects internally that automate the purchasing workflows to make Meta more efficient.”

Geri finds value and inspiration working on business-critical projects. “Meta does a great job of correlating the work you're doing to the impact on the company, so it’s easy to get motivated.” She also says, “I've really appreciated that Meta recruits diverse talent. The diversity in the teams provides learning you can leverage from peers and leaders who look at problem-solving and leadership in different ways.”

Geri observes that the culture at Meta is based on empowerment. “It is a wonderful change of pace to have teams that are able to work autonomously and drive strategy and decision-making.” Recalling some of her past professional experiences before coming to Meta, Geri remembers “Before coming to Meta, I experienced a heavy hand from leaders in decision-making. At Meta, my role in leadership is to encourage, support and guide the team as needed.”

While the path is not yet fully laid out, Ese and Geri agree that the SOE organization will continue to evolve as Meta’s role in building the metaverse gains momentum. “We are just at the start of the metaverse journey, and SOE is helping to build the next generation of infrastructure to support the future vision of the metaverse,” Geri says.

There's no doubt that people within Infrastructure at Meta will continue to drive innovation and industry-shifting big bets. From the unique leadership culture to the road to the metaverse, there are endless sources of inspiration and much to look forward to.