A little more than year after officially opening its Seattle engineering office, Dropbox has grown to 65 people at the location and just expanded onto a second floor of a downtown skyscraper, giving itself room to grow to 150 people total in the office.
“Dropbox is investing heavily in this office — it’s really an extension of the core San Francisco office that happens to be up here,” said Will Kiefer, a staff engineer in the Seattle office who joined Dropbox last year from Google. “Same time zone. It’s got a full swath of representation of all the different projects going on at Dropbox. We wanted to keep growing to both meet the needs of Dropbox and provide the opportunity for engineers in the Seattle area.”
The expansion by the cloud storage and collaboration powerhouse is the latest sign that the tech boom is continuing in the Seattle region, fueled in part by well-known tech brands from outside the area that have established engineering centers in the region — at least 80 companies so far.
Facebook this year moved into a building on Seattle’s Dexter Avenue that will ultimately have space for up to 2,000 people. Google has expanded its Kirkland, Wash., offices and plans a new campus in Seattle’s South Lake Union area, near Amazon, that will replace its current location in the Fremont neighborhood. Twitter, Salesforce, Snapchat, Apple, Groupon, Lyft, Oracle, and Uber represent just a small sampling of the rest.
Dropbox started out on the 64th floor of Seattle’s Columbia Center and just expanded to the 63rd floor, which is connected to the upper floor via a staircase thanks to renovations made by a previous tenant of the space. The staircase had previously been closed off. The location offers sweeping views of the region from all directions, including glimpses of Mount Rainier and downtown Bellevue, Wash.
The head of engineering for Dropbox Seattle is Viraj Mody, the co-founder of Audiogalaxy, who joined the company in 2012.
The company, which also has an engineering office in New York City, lists several open position in Seattle on its jobs site. “Dropbox Seattle is a tiny but rapidly expanding engineering office currently working across Android, desktop, payments, and photos,” explains one job listing for a software engineer.
See our previous post for a peek inside the Dropbox Seattle engineering office when it opened.
