What It Takes to Be a Successful Solutions Engineer at Facebook
When I first heard about the opportunity to work as a Solutions Engineer at Facebook, I had no idea what the day-to-day work would look like. However, I decided to take a leap of faith and jump out of my software engineer comfort zone. Now, after almost four years, I’m proud to say this is my best career decision so far. In this article, I will tell you what a Solutions Engineer (SE) role looks like at Facebook, how to succeed at it, and how being an SE could help advance your career.
At Facebook, an SE works as the bridge between advertisers and product teams to build solutions that facilitate advertisers’ growth using the Facebook family of apps. This role is quite unique when compared to the same role in other companies. While some companies also have Solutions Engineers, they often act as pre- or post-sales engineers. They usually work a lot with businesses but do little coding on the technical side. However, at Facebook, we are good at both.
Software Engineers with a Business Mind
Nowadays a Facebook SE plays a key role in driving both ad-product and advertiser-revenue growth. This is not a reactive, support role that spends 80% of the time doing client meetings or answering technical questions via email. Instead, we are software engineers with a business mind. We spend the bulk of our time doing proactive exploration of clients’ businesses, including understanding their strategic focus and identifying product gaps or missing features. Then we will either kick off a solution build by SE or via collaboration with cross-functional partners across Facebook.
On the business side, each SE is assigned one or two verticals depending on workload and is responsible for driving growth for selected clients. For example, as the big trend of digital transformation continues, we are the core team that works closely with advertisers through the transformation and helps their businesses succeed in the new era of advertising.
On the technical side, an SE is exposed to more tech stacks than a traditional software engineer because we are not tied up to one or two products. During each half of the year, we plan which build project(s) we want to work on after aligning on vision and resourcing with key stakeholders. Then we drive the whole product lifecycle from scoping to implementation. Because we are flexible in terms of choosing the projects we want to work on, we have the opportunity to diversify our engineering skills as well. At the end of the day, we are an engineering team, so we need to write quality code and build solutions to solve business problems. This requires us to have a good understanding of the current product roadmap, and based on the focus vertical, we will most likely concentrate on a few key product areas. When we deliver all the product features, we eventually hand over to the product team for support and maintenance. This requires a lot of coordination with different cross-functional teams; our partners can be any team we collaborate with. For example, it can be the product team, marketing science, product marketing, and more.
At Facebook, an SE doesn’t work directly with the clients; rather, it is the sales team that serves as the front line, directly interacting with clients and handling all the communications. Facebook’s sales team usually includes a Client Solutions Manager, Client Partner, Industry Manager and a Head of Industry. We will often work closely with our sales colleagues to understand the business context and challenges. While working with sales, we also want to make sure that we drive more proactive conversations rather than reactively handling client asks.
Becoming a Better Engineer
When I started at Facebook as a Solutions Engineer back in 2017, I had very limited client interaction skills. Today, I can easily lead a 2-hour brainstorming session with the client’s leadership to talk through their business strategy and provide guidance on how to best execute their business on Facebook.
How do I manage to do this? Having the right ‘SE mindset’ is the key. There are three principles that make up our team’s philosophy: Customer Centricity, Building and Scaling Solutions and Agility
Customer Centricity
What makes us different is that we are a client-centric engineering team. We have empathy for our clients and we are encouraged to be in client meetings as much as possible to learn how clients think. One of the skills we have to learn is the ability to glean the right kinds of insights from clients in order to determine opportunity areas and identify gaps. If your earlier role is a software engineer, this might feel a little uncomfortable at the beginning. But my advice would be to try to be as proactive as you can while working with the sales team, and always make sure you understand the full business context before providing a solution.
Building and Scaling Solutions
The ability to build and scale solutions is key to unlocking our potential as engineers. With this capability, we have more control over our destiny. For example, we don’t have to engage in the lengthy process of convincing other teams that already have a packed roadmap to deprioritize something and work on things we deem important. The work we do every day helps build solutions, removes blockers to scale solutions, and helps make Facebook’s offering more impactful. Scalability is very important at Facebook, and before we build a solution, the first thing we seek to determine is whether a solution would scale beyond current use cases, or if it could unlock more opportunities in other verticals.
Agility
You may have heard about one of Facebook’s famous values: Move Fast. Being able to execute quickly is one thing I see as very important to being a successful SE. It’s a well-known fact in Silicon Valley that as companies grow bigger, they become risk-averse and slower. This is why so many startups get funded and beat large companies consistently. Consider our own company Facebook: When our company was born, there were several large companies that could have done what we do. But for many reasons they either didn’t think the opportunity was big enough or didn’t execute. Agility is key to our team and the value we provide to Facebook as a team. We are more opportunistic (in a good way) and can quickly adapt to market changes and evolving opportunities.
Being a Facebook SE will push your skills to the next level, as you will have the opportunity to lead a project from 0 to 1 in a very short period of time as if you were working at a startup company.
Hopefully now you have a good understanding of what this role looks like at Facebook and how to succeed in being one. Lastly, I want to share a bit of my own experience of what an SE role brings to me. One of the biggest changes I’ve seen during the last few years is a switch from a feature-oriented mindset to a business-oriented one. As a software engineer, you can sometimes be more inclined to concentrate on adding new features without thinking through different business use cases and market fit. By contrast, an SE first looks at the big picture holistically and understands the major pain points by either research or communicating with clients and stakeholders. Indeed, communication skills and project management skills are both very important if you want to pursue a management career in the future. Being an SE brings more possibilities to my career path, as now I’m more of an entrepreneurial engineer who can discover an opportunity, evaluate its potential impact and invest resources to build for it.
