appleeventlogoOver the past few years, Silicon Valley-based companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, Oracle, HP, eBay, and others have opened up engineering centers in Seattle.

Now, Apple is setting up a permanent outpost in the region, too.

The Cupertino-based company confirmed the new location with GeekWire after we published a report on the new office Monday morning, following leads of two job openings that Apple posted this past weekend for engineers interested in working at an office in Seattle.

It’s unclear where Apple is opening the physical office in Seattle — we’ve contacted the company for details — but there are at least 30 engineers already working for Apple in the area, according to LinkedIn.

Of that group, there are five employees who were formerly with Union Bay Networks, a stealthy Seattle cloud networking startup that raised $1.85 million from Madrona Venture Group, Greylock, and Divergent Ventures in July 2013.

unionbayGeekWire stopped by the Union Bay Networks office in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood this morning. The only person there was Union Bay CEO Tom Hull, who declined to comment when asked if Apple had acquired the company. Greg Gottesman, a partner at Madrona, also declined to comment when contacted by us earlier today.

In regard to a potential Union Bay acquisition, Apple would only say that it “buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”

Meanwhile, Union Bay co-founder Benn Bollay is now working as a “Manager” for Apple in Seattle and this past Friday he published a post on LinkedIn about a job opening for a Systems Software Engineer.

“Ever wanted to work at Apple, but didn’t want to live in Cupertino?” Bollay wrote.

In addition, Bollay sent an email to a Seattle tech community forum on Monday morning that noted the job postings.

“Apple is opening up a new office here in Seattle, and they have a couple openings that might be interesting to everyone,” he wrote.

While other tech companies based outside of Washington have opened offices in the Seattle area, Apple has not previously set up shop in the region. Gus Mueller, founder of Flying Meat Software, addressed this issue in August with a post that noted the large population of developers in the Seattle region experienced in Apple’s Cocoa framework for iOS and OS X development, and the frequency with which Apple attempts to recruit these developers to California. Today we spotted at least one Cocoa engineer working in Seattle for Apple.

We’ve contacted Bollay and Apple’s corporate offices, and will update this post when we hear back.

Update — Apple confirmed with GeekWire that it has an office in Seattle proper, though a spokesperson would not indicate where or how many employees work there.

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