Facebook is heading east – at least partially. This afternoon, the company announced that it will be opening an engineering office in New York City starting early in 2012. The move to open a new engineering center away from Silicon Valley is somewhat unusual for a Web 2.0 and technology company, but the amount and quality of potential engineering and computer science employees is strong. Many of those positions in New York City are currently held at financial institutions.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg was not shy when mentioning that the planned new Facebook office is its first away from Silicon Valley, and he was equally excited that Facebook chose New York City as its location for the office.
“We are looking for the smartest folks. And after detailed analysis, the best place by a large margin was New York,” said Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s VP of Engineering.
Potential applicants can submit their résumés online at facebook.com/nycjobs. Currently there are 15 open positions, but executives at Facebook stated that they were unsure how many employees they would eventually hire, inferring that the number could be larger than 15.
