META Meta Platforms Inc

By Deepa Seetharaman 

Attention Wall Street: Instagram is looking to hire.

Facebook Inc.'s photo-sharing app plans to double its engineering staff in New York this year to 150 people. In particular, it is looking for machine-learning experts, many of whom work for hedge funds or investment banks. These "recovering quants"--as Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger calls them--will allow Instagram to more personally tailor its feed and other features to its 600 million users.

The move signals a new stage of growth for Instagram. The expansion of its New York office--which it expects will have half of the company's engineers by the end of next year--means Instagram can "tackle a broader portfolio of things within the product," Mr. Krieger said. Instagram is adding more employees more rapidly than ever; it has already outgrown its brand-new offices in Menlo Park, Calif., which opened just last fall.

The amped-up presence in New York is unusual for Facebook, which likes to keep the bulk of its engineers close to the group's headquarters. But other factors, including tighter competition for engineers in Silicon Valley, prompted Instagram to look elsewhere. The company also has a big base in Seattle, Amazon.com Inc.'s hometown.

Most of Instagram's New York-based engineers will be experts in machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence that enables computers to learn from enormous data sets with minimal human input.

Machine-learning and personalization are at the heart of some of Instagram's top projects, such as a change to its feed a year ago that replaced its reverse-chronological feed with a ranked feed, reordered with posts Instagram predicted users would find interesting at the top. Facebook has had a ranked feed since 2006.

Instagram also uses machine learning to assemble its "Top Live" feature, found on the Explore tab, which shows a montage of the best live-videos on Instagram world-wide. Instagram's safety team uses the technology to detect abusive comments.

These tools came in handy during last year's launch of Stories, a feature that lets users post photos and videos that vanish after 24 hours. The order of the stories at the top of users' feeds is ranked based on Instagram's predictions of what a user will find most interesting.

Instagram is also exploring a way to create thematic Stories, centered around a current event such as last month's Women's March or a topic like cooking, using machine learning, said Blake Barnes, Instagram's product management director overseeing the New York expansion. That effort, which would allow it to personalize thematic stories for each user, would be powered by machine learning.

Snapchat, the disappearing-chat app owned by Snap Inc., has a similar feature through its own Stories tab, but it is hand-curated.

"The arc for us is to try to figure out how people can see what else is going on in the world that's relevant to them," Mr. Barnes said.

Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 15, 2017 08:14 ET (13:14 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.