Facebook's relatively weak mobile offering is top of the list. After a feud with Apple and years of stagnation, the firm's iPhone app has only just been given an overhaul to make it faster and easier to use.
Mobile advertising, a major business priority for Facebook given its members are increasingly accessing their accounts on smartphones and tablets rather than via its full website, is embryonic at best. To date it is offering the makers of Facebook apps the chance to advertise their apps, on Facebook.
"The transition to mobile has been a difficult one," said Mike Schroepfer, the chief of Facebook's engineering effort, and the most senior executive dispatched to open the London office this week.
"We just want to be wherever you are," he adds, insisting that although mobile advertising is a brand new business for Facebook, the opportunities are great because attention is more focused on a smaller screen.
"It cuts both ways because you have a very intimate single app experience. It's more immersive even though it's a smaller screen."
Facebook is still experimenting with how exactly it can cater to andcapitalise on its vast mobile audience – 600 million per month at the most recent count – and it's planned that London will play a key role in the process.
The team will work on the Facebook app for Google's Android operating system, which is installed on hundreds of millions of devices and is due to receive a major revamp to match that enjoyed by iPhone users. They will also work on the nuts and bolts at the other end; the servers and connections that actually deliver friends' messages and photos to the app.
"Only half of that performance problem is the app itself," said Philip Su, the executive sent from Seattle to lead recruitment.
The decision to locate its first non-American engineering unit in London, rather than, say, Dublin, where its European operations are headquartered, or Berlin, which has a similarly thriving web development sector, was a combination of the capital's existing talent pool and its draw.
"We looked into a number of different regions and cities in Europe," said Mr Schroepfer.
"[But] London has a large indigenous tech base, plus the ability to draw on others'."
As well as British developers, it's hoped that the bright lights of London will attract the best from Scandinavia, France and the rest of the continent.
Aside from mobile, London engineers will also work on machine learning, an advanced form of artificial intelligence used by Facebook for an array of problems such as spam filtering, so the cluster of top computer science departments in and around the capital was another attraction.
Mr Su brought 12 engineers with him from the United States, and has so far recruited only a handful more locally. It's planned, however, that although it will remain much smaller than the Facebook mothership in Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, he aims to have a "small but high impact" to match Seattle, and Facebook's other engineering satellite in New York. Each has more than 100 developers.
"We have a set of engineering offices that are relatively equal in terms of size and impact," agreed Mr Schroepfer.
The most talented software engineers, including Britons, are bombarded with generous offers from Silicon Valley firms, so the gloom around Facebook's stock performance may not help its recruiters in a market where the promise of share option riches is standard. But Mr Schroepfer, who as a major shareholder has on paper lost hundreds of millions of dollars since the flotation, claimed more concern about the challenges the new London staff will face.
"It's never fun to have the press and public speaking negatively," he said.
"[But] the reason that everyone is here hasn't changed at all. I'm more upset that people were giving our app two stars."
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