Instagram’s head engineer on what makes a great engineering team

Try looking up Nam Nguyen on LinkedIn, and you might have trouble finding the Instagram head engineer’s profile. He has one, but he’s listed himself as “an intern @ Instagram.” That’s his way of beating the professional network’s search algorithm, but there’s also a simpler reason: he sees no reason to boast about his qualifications, online or offline.

Nguyen has a lot to be proud of, though. Today, he oversees the team behind the photo and video-sharing social networking app that has over one billion monthly active users.

Nam Nguyen speaking at Facebook ID8 / Photo credit: Facebook

Working at a company that has such a huge impact is “very empowering and meaningful,” says Nguyen. “How many times in your career do you get a chance to be involved in a product that touches the lives of your friends [from] many years ago?”

He spoke to Tech in Asia at the sidelines of Facebook iD8 last week, an event for developers and engineers. “All my high school friends in Vietnam use Facebook. It makes me feel proud,” Nguyen shares. The US social media giant acquired Instagram in 2012 for US$1 billion.

Born and raised in Vietnam, Nguyen aspired to be a math teacher when he was a child. But his life trajectory changed dramatically in the early 1980s when his parents put him in a boat that sailed for Southeast Asia following the Vietnam War. Together with 68 others, he gained entry into Singapore after the boat was picked up by a US Navy ship. He spent over a year in refugee camps in the city-state and Indonesia before setting off for the US, where he attended community college before transferring to a university.

Without native proficiency in English, Nguyen’s dream of being a teacher was no longer viable. “For someone who studied English as a second language, the aspiration to become a math teacher was out [of the picture,]” he recalls. Instead, he studied electrical engineering at university and took up computer science classes in his senior year. That, for Nguyen, marked the start of his journey in engineering.

Facebook is the seventh company Nguyen has worked at. Before assuming his role at Instagram in April, he was an organizational leader in Facebook, where he managed the teams that built its technological infrastructure. He’s also worked at networking hardware company Cisco, and had a 12-year stint at Yahoo where he joined before the internet became widely popular. He eventually rose to the position of vice president at the web services provider, but when an opportunity in engineering management at Facebook opened up, he seized it.

Software engineers are in high demand at technology conglomerates like Facebook and with the broad spectrum of roles available, young engineers are spoiled for choice. Up-and-coming engineers should therefore seek and experience in a variety of roles, Nguyen advises, so they can eventually specialize in an area they’re passionate about.

“In the early part of a young engineer’s career, the most important thing is learning and discovery – you have to discover what it is you’re really good at, what you enjoy doing. That will allow you – in the later parts of your career – to go deep in the areas that you really love,” he says.

It’s also a plus that mobility within Facebook’s engineering department is high, according to Nguyen. There’s a “very low barrier” within the team, and “95% to 96% of engineers can move around after a year in their current job” between functions like user interface, back end, and machine learning.

Facebook’s engineering culture

For over eight years at Facebook, Nguyen led a group of engineers that tackled infrastructure. At Instagram, managing an engineering team in a highly cross-functional environment with peers in product management, analytics, design, user research and communications employs an entirely different thought process.

In the early days of a company, products tend to be feature-centric and are constantly iterated, Nguyen observes. “You have to focus on building the features [that] users are looking for based on user feedback.”

Fostering innovation

Tackling cyberbullying and data privacy