Facebook's hunger for software engineers is insatiable

Dec 5, 2011 15:11 GMT  ·  By

Facebook has announced that it is expanding its engineering team beyond its headquarters in Palo Alto, California and will build a sizeable force on the US East coast, in New York.

This will be the first such move outside of the West Coast. Most of Facebook employees work at its headquarters, but Facebook has smaller teams in Seattle, for example.

But it is moving east to feed its ever-growing hunger for software engineers, following other big companies, notably its rival Google which has a huge office in New York and quite a large team there.

"To keep up with its rapid growth, Facebook today announced plans to establish an engineering presence in New York City and tap into the remarkable technical talent that the region has to offer," Facebook announced.

"The Facebook NYC engineering office, the company’s first outside the West Coast, will open in early 2012 and will begin accepting applications immediately," it said.

Facebook also said that it planned to hire thousands of people in the next year alone. It already has some 3,000 employees, but wants to grow extensively over the next few years.

Its new Palo Alto headquarters can house a lot more people than what Facebook currently employs, at least by the time Facebook is done with the renovations and the new buildings it's got planned.

Facebook hasn't said how many people it plans to hire in New York, but judging by all the attention it's generating for the move, it will be a significant number.

"More than 800 million people around the world rely on Facebook, and more than half of them visit every day. Operating at such a large scale, and innovating as quickly as we do, we need to recruit the most talented engineers in the world," Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s vice president of Engineering, motivated the move.