Facebook Affirms Libra Commitment With 50 New Job Openings in Ireland

Libra may have been scaled back but Facebook is significantly expanding the team working to support the stablecoin project.

The social media giant is looking to hire 50 people for its payments subsidiary Calibra – charged with creating a wallet for storing and sending libra – to start work at its offices in Dublin by the end of 2020. The news was first reported by the Irish Times on Monday.

A Calibra spokesperson told CoinDesk many of the new Dublin openings are for a new compliance team to liaise with regulators, as well as for specialists who can work on the wallet’s fraud protection program. There will also be a new customer service team to handle complaints – a sign the project is readying its launch.

“We’re actively hiring experts in fraud, compliance, workforce management and customer care to expand our operations team supporting the Calibra Wallet,” said Laura Morgan Walsh, Calibra’s head of operations. “We believe financial inclusion is a problem that can be solved and we are looking for more dedicated professionals to join us.”

Facebook first came to Ireland back in 2009. Attracted to the country’s low corporation tax, it set up its European headquarters in the capital. As well as being the firm’s European headquarters, much of the Irish office also works on global projects such as infrastructure engineering in regions including the Middle East and Africa.

Since 2009, the number of staff employed by Facebook and its partner companies in Ireland has ballooned from 30 to more than 5,000 people. The Calibra openings form part of a new recruitment drive that could take its Irish presence up to 7,000 people by the end of 2020.

Monday’s news comes less than a week after the Swiss-based Libra Association said it was going to scale back its ambitions in an effort to appease governments and central bankers. Instead of one crypto pegged to a basket of currencies, the new design will see multiple libras launch, each pegged to different fiats, such as the U.S. dollar and the euro.

Calibra – which while a Facebook subsidiary is a separate entity to the Libra Association – is already advertising for 26 job opportunities for its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Most of these openings are for developers, backend staff and those savvy with regulatory compliance.

According to job postings on its LinkedIn profile, many of these openings have only had one or two applicants, despite some of them being advertised for well over a month.