Tim Prouty will be starting up the new office for Uber.
Tim Prouty will be starting up the new office for Uber.

It’s confirmed: On-demand transportation company Uber is opening a Seattle engineering office, with plans to hire as many as 50 people or more this year.

The office will be started up by Tim Prouty, a University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering alum who was most recently a director of engineering at EMC’s Isilon Storage Division, reporting to Paul Mikesell, an Uber infrastructure engineering director and another UW alum, according to a post this morning on the UW CSE News site.

“At Uber one of my primary goals will be to grow the team very rapidly from 0 to 50+ people this year, so we’ll be working hard to make a splash in the Seattle technology community over the next few months,” the post quotes Prouty as saying.

GeekWire first reported news of Uber’s plans for the Seattle engineering office in December, based on a job post seeking an engineering manager in the city. We’ve contacted Prouty and the company for additional information on the work the office will be doing and the potential direction of the engineering efforts here.

Update: Uber released a statement from general manager Brooke Steger: “We are thrilled to announce the expansion of Uber’s Seattle team. Seattle was one of Uber’s first cities and we are excited to continue to generate jobs in the area by tapping into the city’s impressive talent pool.”

The company’s jobs site currently lists openings in Seattle for its scalability engineering team.  Prouty has been at Isilon since 2006, since long before the company was acquired by data-storage giant EMC.

Uber has a large majority of its engineers in San Francisco, and a few others scattered among New York City, Lithuania, and Bulgaria. The seven-year-old company, which is operating in 250 cities, last year opened a mobile development shop in Amsterdam.

The company joins a long list of tech companies to establish engineering outposts and competing for technical talent in the Seattle region, including Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Salesforce, Twitter and many others.

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