Facebook has announced it will hire an extra 500 people who will work in the new headquarters in London next year.

The company's European head Nicola Mendelsohn said the aim is to bring the headcount from 1,000 to 1,500 by 2017, with many of the new jobs being high-skilled engineering jobs.

“The UK remains one of the best places to be a tech company and is an important part of Facebook's story. We came to London in 2007 with just a handful of people, by the end of next year we will have opened a new HQ and plan to employ 1500 people," Mendelsohn said in a statement to Mashable.

The new office is under construction in Fitzrovia, central London.

Mendelsohn pointed out that the UK is "home to the company's biggest engineering base outside the US".

She brought as an example the team in Somerset, which developed Aquila, a solar powered unmanned plane that will connect remote area of the world to the internet.

London was also where Workplace, a platform aimed at connecting workers in simpler ways, was launched in October 2016.

The moves comes after Google confirmed plans to build a new headquarters in London and create 3,000 jobs in a £1bn investment plan.