What it was like working on LLMs and security at Meta (2022-2026)
Joshua Saxe
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What it was like working on LLMs and security at Meta (2022-2026)
Joshua Saxe<br>May 20, 2026
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I loved my time at Meta, and I also counted the days between equity vests and daydreamed about quitting on the morning after almost every one. It was the most exciting engineering culture I’ve ever been part of, and at its worst it could feel like a perverse psychology experiment. I was proud to work on Llama, CodeLlama, the foundations of LLM security and LLMs for security, on AI content moderation tech for 3.5 billion people, on the open source AI security products my teams shipped; I was also embarrassed by the internal incentives that motivated us to get people wasting more and more minutes of their wild and precious lives scrolling Instagram Reels.<br>Today Meta laid off ten percent of its employees. I left on my own volition in February. Many of the people I looked up to have already gone to Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft. With a couple of months of distance from working there, after layoffs, departures, and the strange feeling of watching a place I loved take one more step down the staircase of its cultural ruin, it feels like the right moment to write something in the hopes it’ll be helpful to myself and others.<br>A beehive of individual ambition
Imagine someone who freaked out the one time they got an A-minus, who has passed a series of meritocratic gates and received the appropriate accolades and awards, and for whom getting into Meta was like getting into their second choice elite college, and is now at Meta, and expects a series of good accolades and rewards to continue to be meted out by the new institution they’ve joined.<br>This felt like the median engineer and product manager at Meta; the company recruited for and filtered for such people, placing them inside a Skinnerian conditioning experiment in which bad performance gets you managed out and good performance is rewarded with money that can change the shape of your life, or at least buy you a house and a financial cushion in San Jose or Fremont; everyone at Meta is running from desperately from the former and manically chasing the latter.<br>The upside of this is that you could assume far more competence from basically everyone you interacted with at Meta than at other places I’ve worked, and a kind of background urgency and low-key fight or flight trauma energy animating whatever they were doing, including when they were collaborating with you.<br>I joined in summer 2022 at the tail end of the pandemic hiring boom, when I suspect they’d lowered the hiring bar, and of the ten or so friends I referred during my time there - once the company had begun the process of layoffs and attrition and raised the bar again - none made it through.<br>I always felt like an odd duck; I’m self taught, have a graduate degree in the humanities, live and work remotely from Kansas, and somehow clawed my way up. But I learned that that’s comparing my insides to others’ outsides; I think all of us felt lucky to be there but that our status there was contingent and unstable.<br>Flatness
Meta’s employee net worth ranges from billions to nothing and is wildly unequal, but also no one said “I manage a team” at Meta, everyone said “I support a team,” and in most companies engineering managers manage engineers, but at Meta, in the language at least, they served them.<br>This felt actually meaningful and good, as did the fact that every engineer’s title was simply “software engineer”, not “senior principal architect of X.” There’s probably an IC9 somewhere at Meta who runs all of Meta’s billion dollar datacenters and undersea network cabling and thus manages billions of dollars in global capital but whose title is the same as the new grad’s and I really liked this.<br>There was also an unpretentiousness and kind of Israeli directness and flatness about the place I really enjoyed; any engineer could propose anything, could give blunt, polite feedback about anything to anyone, although how far the proposal or critique traveled depended somewhat on prestige, social network, and level.<br>Also, the place was full of nerds who played Magic the Gathering and were part of Linux club in college, and aside from the competition there was genuine bonding over craft.<br>Workplace
The internal communication system, Workplace, is a literal fork of the Facebook app. Whereas on Facebook people flex about their vacations, on Workplace people flex about both their vacations and also how productive and impactful they are.<br>Whereas people on Facebook fret about how many likes they got on their wedding photos, people on Workplace fret about that but also whether their director ‘heart’ emojied their confessional piece about the stress they’d been under in shipping that director-priority thing that half.<br>A typical thing on a team is for the tech lead to start a Google doc with a draft Workplace post that people pile...