Gadget tinkering can easily land you a high-profile job like in the case of the iPhone and Sony PlayStation 3 hacker, who was reportedly hired by social media giant Facebook to re-focus his energy in developing the company's upcoming application for iPad.

First reported by The Washington Post, Facebook confirmed reports that George Hotz is now a company employee yet no further information was provided by the popular social networking site, according to ABC News.

Fellow hackers also confirmed that 'GeoHot', Hotz's hacking monicker, has been working with Facebook since May, whose 'resume' includes cracking the iPhone in 2008 to allow usage of the smartphone apart from the then excusive carrier AT&T.

This year, Hotz blogged on the detailed instructions that would allow users to run pirated PS3 games on the Sony console, prompting the Japanese company to sue him than ended in a settlement on March 31 which required Hotz to withdraw the PS3 hacking guidelines from his blog site.

Yet before that deal, Hotz legal predicaments earned the sympathy of his fellow hackers, who then launched an attacked on Sony's PlayStation network that exposed the personal and credit card information of up to 100 millions consumers subscribed to the service.

Following the deal with Sony, Hotz released a statement stressing that he was not guilty of any cyber crimes and did not intend to pilfer the personal data of Sony customers while at the same time scoring the deeds of the hackers who breached the company's security protocol.

Also, he underscored that "it was never my intention to cause any users trouble or to make piracy easier."

Hotz also blogged that hacking that entails data theft is damaging to the community he belongs with as he stressed that "running homebrew and exploring security on your devices is cool, hacking into someone else's server and stealing databases of user info is not cool."

Nonetheless, colleagues and experts alike seemed not surprise that the controversial will win the interest of a giant firm like Facebook considering his tech achievements at a young age, which includes plaudits from tech experts, consultancy stints with Google and scientific feats that showcased his skills.