Snapchat gave the first clues about its plans for Seattle with this mysterious billboard last year.
Snapchat gave the first clues about its plans for Seattle with this mysterious billboard last year.

Snapchat will set up its new engineering office across from Seattle’s Pike Place Market, in the same building where Facebook got its start in the city more than five years ago.

The high-flying messaging company has leased about 8,000 square feet of space on the eighth floor of 101 Stewart St., the First & Stewart Building, according to permit filings, commercial real estate sources, and building staffers on site.

The company, which has had a temporary office in Seattle for a few months, is expected to move in to the official space next month, and is now advertising for engineers in Seattle on its jobs page.

“We are a passionate team working hard to help people share authentic moments with friends,” the job posting reads, in part. “We have tons of interesting technical challenges, including architecting and deploying infrastructure to handle our scale, designing a slick and secure mobile client, and maintaining an application that sees millions of users and billions of requests per day.”

101 Stewart
Snapchat’s Seattle engineering office will be based at 101 Stewart St., near the Pike Place Market.

Snapchat representatives didn’t respond to a request for additional details on the company’s plans. The amount of space that the company has leased could accommodate 50 employees or more, depending on the configuration.

The privately held company — headquartered in Venice, Calif. and reportedly valued as high as $16 billion — gave the first clues about its plans here when it put up a billboard last fall on state Route 99 in Seattle. GeekWire was previously able to confirm the temporary location using a picture posted to Snapchat by an employee.

Snapchat joins a wave of tech ventures from California that have established engineering centers in the Seattle region, seeking to tap into the area’s talent pool. Facebook, for its part, plans to move this year from its current location near Interstate 5 to a new office building on Dexter Avenue with room for as many as 2,000 employees.

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