Facebook’s dizzying growth all over the Seattle area continues unabated, and now the social media giant’s regional presence is up to 3,000 employees, with hundreds more jobs waiting to be filled.
Facebook’s headcount in the Seattle region, confirmed by the company, is up from 2,000 in March. Facebook has tripled the size of its Seattle-area engineering center — its largest outside of the company’s Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters — in a little over two years.
A big part of Facebook’s Seattle-area growth is the explosion of the campus in Redmond, Wash., just a few miles down the road from Microsoft for Oculus/Facebook Reality Labs. It has been on a hiring spree for more than a year now, and it has more open positions than any Oculus office outside Menlo Park.
The growth of Facebook’s Seattle presence reflects a major jump in headcount companywide. Facebook added more than 10,000 people worldwide in the past year, a 45 percent increase that brings its total headcount to 33,606 people as of Sept. 30, according to numbers disclosed in its third-quarter results. Facebook added more than 3,300 people in the last three months alone.
That still pales in comparison to older tech companies like Amazon (613,000 employees, including Whole Foods), Google parent Alphabet (94,000), and Microsoft (135,000). But it’s a record for Facebook in both yearly and quarterly growth, underscoring the fact that the company is still very much in growth mode, even as it grapples with privacy challenges, increased regulatory scrutiny and the departure of key executives from past acquisitions.
Facebook is showing no signs of slowing its growth in Seattle. The company has nearly 2,100 open positions across North America, according to its job board, and roughly one in five of those are located either in Seattle or Redmond, the most by far of any region outside of Menlo Park.
All of these new employees will have to go somewhere, so Facebook has become one of the most active eaters of office space in the Seattle area over the couple years.
The company opened a large new office building in Seattle earlier this year, less than two years after opening another big new building nearby. Another new office project in the same neighborhood of South Lake Union — which is also home to Amazon and the huge Google campus that is under construction — is on the way.
The Redmond campus for Oculus could soon be even larger than Facebook’s Seattle presence. The company is reportedly teeing up a 650,000-square-foot office project under the mysterious moniker of “Building X” on a site it bought earlier this year. The project would push the growing Redmond campus well over 1 million square feet. Facebook also recently scooped up space in two Bellevue office towers, with the leases totaling 85,000 square feet.
