For Ryan Mack, who heads up Facebook’s soon-to-be 50-person office in Cambridge, the line between his work and his personal passion has gotten a little blurry. Pun intended. Mack, 34, bought his first digital camera in 1997 and says it’s become his biggest hobby. Unorthodox photography environments such as underwater are a favorite; locations for his underwater shoots have included Australia and, soon, Indonesia.
Underwater photography "gives an otherworldly experience—clothing and scenery are not constrained by gravity."
“The environments are just fascinating—there are these great vistas of coral and fish,” Mack said. And underwater portrait photography is something he wants to explore more in the future. It “gives an otherworldly experience—clothing and scenery are not constrained by gravity,” he said. Overall, Mack said he just enjoys being underwater, which, for an underwater photographer, requires wearing scuba gear.
“It’s where I go to relax,” he said. “For me it’s an extremely peaceful place.”
But Mack has found plenty of reasons to pick up his camera at work, too—most of the photos that've been distributed of Facebook’s Cambridge office were taken by Mack, for instance. His penchant for photographing otherworldly environments also led him to take the photo that's below, of Facebook recruiter Abby Rose (a.k.a. “Headstand Abby”) in Facebook's Forest City, N.C., data center.
Meanwhile, Mack is also known for helping to lead work on Facebook’s photos technology. That included an effort in 2012 to improve the quality and color of photos uploaded to Facebook—something he was inspired to take on after noticing issues with the quality of a photo he’d shared.
Growing in Boston
Facebook Boston is focused on "the systems that make it easy to develop the applications that reach millions of users."
Next week, Mack won’t be talking about photography—I assume—when he takes the stage at State of Innovation along with other leaders in the Boston tech community. There, he’ll be part of a panel on scaling up in Boston, which Mack is very much in the middle of right now. The company, which isn’t disclosing how many employees it has in Cambridge, previously said it would be doubling its staff in the office in 2015. Mack said the target is to be at 50 or more employees by year's end, with a focus on “areas we feel are a good match for Boston technical talent”—such as storage, networking and security. The general focus of the office is on infrastructure engineering — “the systems that make it easy to develop the applications that reach millions of users,” Mack said.
Though 50 employees is certainly nowhere near what Facebook has for staff in Silicon Valley—which famously lured Facebook out of Cambridge in the first place—it’s certainly a lot more than what the company had in the Boston area for years after Mark Zuckerberg and co. departed. And a lot of that is because of Mack. He’d been working for Facebook in California in 2011 when his wife was recruited to work for a biotech startup in the Boston area. Mack got the go-ahead to move to Boston and work remotely, but eventually learned of a few other Facebook employees in the area. The group got space at Workbar—first at South Station, then in Central Square—before launching an official engineering office at One Broadway in Kendall Square in November 2013.
For more on BostInno's State of Innovation, see below:
Photos used with permission from Ryan Mack.
