Facebook to Open New Engineering Office in New York

By Veronica Grecu, Associate Editor

Facebook, the world’s largest and fastest-growing social networking company, has announced plans to increase its footprint in New York by adding an engineering center in early 2012. The announcement was made recently by Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, at the company’s existing office located at 335 Madison Avenue, reports Bloomberg. Although no exact numbers were disclosed for the new New York office, Sandberg said that the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company plans to add thousands of jobs globally by the end of 2012. The social networking giant has about 3,000 workers around the world and more than 800 million users.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook opened its first New York office in 2007; in July 2011, the company moved into the 40,000-square-foot facility on Madison Avenue, where 100 marketing and recruiting people are employed. Facebook Vice President Mike Schroepfer, who also participated at the announcement event, said that the new New York center will be core to the company’s engineering, due to the city’s strong history of innovation and large pool of talented technical people who can help the company solve the challenges of designing and building the next generation of Facebook.

The new office in New York is the company’s first engineering center outside the West Coast and will be led by Serkan Piantino, says ABC Local. Piantino also managed Facebook’s News Feed engineering team and projected the infrastructure for Timeline.

Photo courtesy of Facebook Engineering NYC fan page