The Jawbone device

Jawbone, the San Francisco Bluetooth headset and speaker maker which announced $49 million in venture financing today, is planning a new engineering office in Seattle, GeekWire has learned.

The operation marks the latest San Francisco Bay Area technology company to establish a beachhead in Seattle, which is fast becoming a critical outpost for fast-growing technology companies looking to poach smart engineers.

Last year, Facebook, Salesforce and Zynga announced new engineering offices in Seattle. Earlier this month, Zynga announced that it had tapped Neil Roseman — the former CEO of Evri and vice president of engineering at Amazon.com — to lead its Seattle operation.

A spokeswoman at Jawbone confirmed the new Seattle office in an interview today. A company statement will be forthcoming on GeekWire.

It is unclear at this point where the office will be located or how many employees the company plans to employ. But it does appear as if Jawbone is starting to ramp up its search for talented workers.

The company has already tapped one Seattle techie to help lead the charge. Adam MacBeth, the former director of engineering at Symform and former CTO at MergeLab, is now working as the company’s director of software, according to his LinkedIn profile.

We’ve reached out to MacBeth for comment, but have yet to hear back.

Meanwhile, a recent job post on the company’s Web site says that it Jawbone is “expanding into Seattle and the time has come to build the team.”

“We are hiring generalist software engineers with a strong systems and networking background across client and server – people who can work with multiple technologies at multiple levels,” according to the job description.

It continues:

“’Good enough’ is simply not in Jawbone DNA as we are maniacally focused on creating products that just work. Read no further if you do not have a passion for creating products that delight consumers that are functionally sublime not to mention aesthetically beautiful. You only live once so make it count for something special.”

Jawbone is backed by Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures, with new investor Andreessen Horowitz leading today’s massive round. Total funding now stands at about $100 million.

John Cook is co-founder of GeekWire, a tech news site in Seattle. Follow on Twitter: @geekwirenews.

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