Facebook has started its largest hiring spree since the inception of the company, looking to add 1,200 new employees to several different roles.

The new recruitment drive follows a variety of acquisitions in 2014, expanding Facebook from a rather one-dimension social network into new fields like virtual reality, messaging, drones, data centers and global internet.

Like Us on Facebook

Facebook currently has over 8,000 employees worldwide, rather low for a huge internet company. To put in perspective, Google employees over 55,000 workers and Yahoo! has over 13,000 employees.

Even though most of the jobs available involve engineer or scientist degrees, Facebook is opening up more technical and niche jobs for developers, especially in the virtual reality field where 55 jobs are available.

"We are an ambitious company run by an ambitious CEO," Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg told Reuters. "Our users are growing and our business is growing and we want to support that."

Facebook has 1.3 billion users on its social network, and it might have many more if Zuckerberg's plan to enter China works. The CEO was seen courting the internet regulator Lu Wei, showing books of Xi Jinping scattered in the offices.

It also has the largest messaging platform with WhatsApp and the fastest growing social network with Instagram. All of these different services combine into a huge portfolio for Facebook, but in order to keep growth high it needs fresh faces.

Google is reportedly on a different route with employment, with some reports claiming engineers want to leave the search giant as soon as they receive their annual stock paycheck.

TagsFacebook jobs, engineers, developers