Google this morning broke ground on a new building that will double the size of the company’s existing engineering center in Kirkland, Wash., just down the road from Microsoft headquarters — aiming to give itself more room to grow amid a fiercely competitive market for software engineers.
Teams at the company’s existing Kirkland engineering center, next to the new construction site, work on projects including Google+, Cloud and Chrome. Google also has engineering operations on the other side of Lake Washington in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood.
The 180,000-square foot expansion, originally announced in March, is slated for completion by the end of 2015. In conjunction with the groundbreaking, the company released a series of new renderings showing what the new building will look like, complete with a rooftop deck.