Looks like Apple will be making its presence felt in the Pacific Northwest as the company has confirmed to The Seattle Times it is opening an engineering office in Seattle, mainly comprised of former employees from Union Bay Networks, a cloud computing startup:
An Apple spokesman confirmed that the company has indeed opened an engineering office in Seattle, but declined to provide further details. It is the company’s first engineering office in the Northwest and is likely to continue growing.
The nucleus of the Apple office is a group of employees who had worked at Union Bay Networks, a cloud computing startup near Google’s Seattle campus in Fremont. Union Bay’s information email no longer works, and at least five of its employees have changed their LinkedIn profiles to say they began working at Apple in September.
Seven of the startup’s nine employees became Apple employees and are working at an undisclosed office location in the city.
Benn Bollay, a former chief technology officer from Union Bay, posted on LinkedIn last Friday the following (which has since been removed): “Ever wanted to work at Apple, but didn’t want to live in Cupertino?”
The post stated it was “looking for talented multidisciplinary engineers to design and develop the core infrastructure services and environments driving every online customer experience at Apple ranging from iCloud to iTunes.”
News of the Apple office opening up in Seattle was first reported by Geekwire, which stopped by Union Bay Networks’ office in the Fremont area this morning, but the only person there was CEO Tom Hull, who declined to comment on the Apple deal; the latter later confirmed it did indeed have a Seattle office but did not comment on how many or where employees worked there.
Despite the Seattle area being populated with high numbers of developers working for big companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe, Google and more, Apple never had an office in the area until now. The new location surely will attract local talent interested in working for Apple without having to relocate to Cupertino.
