Tech companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, Uber, Lyft, Salesforce, and many more all have engineering offices in the Seattle region.
Now Pinterest is joining the party.
The Bay Area-based content-sharing company valued at $11 billion confirmed on Tuesday that it will open its first engineering office outside of San Francisco at the WeWork building in downtown Seattle. There are four employees currently at the office; the plan is to reach 30 employees over the next year and open a permanent office.
Mukund Narasimhan, a two-year veteran of Pinterest with experience at places like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, will lead the Seattle office, where employees will focus on engineering performance, advertiser experiences and Pinterest’s ranking system that powers its home feed of image-based content.
Pinterest, founded in 2010 by Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp and Paul Sciarra, counts more than 100 million monthly active users and employs more than 800 employees — engineers make up nearly half of its workforce. The company, like rival social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, is making a new push into video. It also just poached an advertising analytics guru from Snapchat.
Pinterest, which has raised $1.3 billion to date, is one of more than 80 out-of-town tech companies that have engineering offices in the Seattle area, hoping to tap into the technical talent base in a region that is also more affordable for many folks looking to re-locate from the Bay Area.
GeekWire has closely tracked the opening of the offices in the Seattle area, and you can see the full list here.
Pinterest has ventured into the Pacific Northwest in the past, making the “acqui-hire” of Seattle startup Livestar in 2013. In that case, the small team at Livestar moved to the Bay Area to be a part of Pinterest’s growing engineering team.
