Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has confirmed to Geekwire that it had opened an office in Seattle, the company’s first significant foray in the Pacific Northwest. Over the years, Silicon Valley juggernauts such as Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) and Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) have opened officea in Seattle, and Apple is the latest to be attracted by the area’s software expertise, especially engineers with experience in building the online infrastructure.
Union Bay employees working for Apple
An administrative office in the area will help the iPhone maker to enhance its cloud offerings and reduce the gap between cloud services in Seattle. According to Apple spokesman, the company has an engineering office in Seattle, but kept further information under the hood. This would be the company’s first engineering office in Northwest, and the company will likely expand further.
As of now, it is not clear the exact location where the company is opening the office, but according to Geekwire (citing LinkedIn) at least 30 engineers already working for Apple in the area
Apple Inc.’s new engineering office has a group of employee, who were previously employed at Union Bay Networks, a cloud computing startup headquartered in the vicinity of Google’s Seattle campus in Fremont. As of September, five Union Bay employees have changed their LinkedIn profiles saying that they have started working at Apple.
Apple hiring for Seattle office
Union Bay CEO Tom Hull turned down a request for comment when asked whether Apple has acquired it, according to a report from Geekwire. The iPhone maker gave a rather unclear statement saying that the company keeps on buying technology startups from time to time and does not discuss purposes or plans.
Union Bay co-founder Benn Bollay is now at Apple working as a Manager in Seattle, and last Friday he posted on LinkedIn about a job opening for a system software engineer.
“Ever wanted to work at Apple, but didn’t want to live in Cupertino?” Bollay wrote. Bollay also sent an email to the Seattle tech community forum on Monday morning, mentioning that Apple is setting up a new office in Seattle and has a couple of openings.
