Airbnb is opening its first engineering center outside of San Francisco.
The Bay Area hospitality company announced today that it is expanding its existing office in Portland to include product and engineering teams. This marks the first time Airbnb will have engineers, product managers, designers, usability researchers, and data scientists outside of its headquarters.
About a year ago, Airbnb opened a North American operational headquarters in downtown Portland at the Blagen Block building. There are now 200 people working there, largely focused on customer experience.
Now, Airbnb will now add a small group of engineers and designers to its Portland office, with plans to grow the team in the future.
“Portland has an incredible sense of community and a fast-growing tech scene, which is why we’re very excited that Portland will host our first product and engineering office outside of our San Francisco headquarters,” Mike Curtis, vice president of engineering at Airbnb, said in a statement. “We look forward to expanding our team and to building a new home in the Pacific Northwest.”
The company did not comment on whether it plans to open an engineering center in Seattle, where tech giants like Google, Twitter, Salesforce, Uber, Lyft, and others all have offices. Google also has a Portland office, which recently expanded, as does Salesforce, eBay, New Relic, and others. Amazon now has a presence in the city after acquiring Elemental Technologies for $296 million in October.
Airbnb’s service, which lets people rent out their apartments and homes to travelers, was legalized in Portland in July 2014. Four months prior to that, Airbnb also picked Portland to be its first “Shared City,” part of an initiative “to help civic leaders and our community create more shareable, more livable cities through relevant, concrete actions and partnerships.”
Here’s a look inside Airbnb’s Portland office:
