Wayfair, the home products company that competes with Amazon for e-commerce customers, is opening a corporate office in Seattle with plans to hire more than 200 tech employees.
The plans were announced in an internal memo sent to Wayfair employees this week. The company previously announced that it would be opening engineering sites and hiring 1,000 technologists in the San Francisco Bay Area, Austin and Toronto.
The expansion is the first for Wayfair beyond its headquarters locations in Boston and Berlin.
There are 28 jobs listed for Seattle on the Wayfair site right now, including roles such as software engineers, product managers, experience designers, analytics, and data scientists. The office is scheduled to open in 2022, but hiring will begin immediately, with roles starting remotely.
Wayfair has not made a decision yet on where the office will be located. The company has a distribution warehouse in Kent, Wash., as part of its logistics network that includes 18 fulfillment and 38 delivery centers across the U.S., Germany, and the U.K.
Of its 16,000 employees, 3,000 work in tech roles for Wayfair, which was founded in 2002. The company says it serves 29 million active customers, offers 22 million home products from more than 16,000 suppliers, and did $14.1 billion in net revenue for the year ending Sept. 30.
All of that adds up to competition for Amazon as far Andy Jassy sees it. The Amazon CEO, in a September interview with CNBC, was fending off calls that the tech giant is a monopoly and ripe for antitrust scrutiny.
“We compete with very large companies,” Jassy said. “These are companies like Walmart and Target and Kroger and some very successful digital companies like eBay and Etsy and Wayfair, and we don’t have the ability to raise prices in any kind of unfettered way. In fact, if you look at what we normally do, we’re constantly taking prices down because there’s a lot of competition in these markets.”
