Meet the brains behind the rise of Facebook

Jay Parikh sits at a desk inside Building 16 at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, and his administrative assistant, Genie Samuel, sits next to him. Every so often, Parikh will hear her giggle, and that means she just tagged him in some sort of semi-embarrassing photo uploaded to, yes, Facebook. Typically, her giggle is immediately followed by a notification on his Facebook page. If it’s not, he has some work to do.

Parikh is Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure engineering. He oversees the hardware and software that underpins the world’s most popular social network, and if that notification doesn’t appear within seconds, it’s his job to find out why. The trouble is that the Facebook infrastructure now spans four data centers in four separate parts of the world, tens of thousands of computer servers, and more software tools than you could list without taking a deep breath in the middle of it all. The cause of that missing notification is buried somewhere inside one of the largest operations on the net.