Airbnb has announced its plans for a San Jose based office. This new office will be in Downtown San Jose’s WeWork location where there are two buildings known as Riverpark Towers comprising the 72,160 square foot WeWork space. This co-working concept office space is also host to other fast-growing tech companies such as Cohesity, the data storage unicorn start-up, and Intacct, a financial software startup.
The San Francisco-based online hospitality and marketplace company plans to expand its engineering team with 50 seats at the WeWork office during the first quarter of the year.
“This announcement represents our continued commitment to supporting the Bay Area’s economy and technology industry,” Ari Balogh, Airbnb’s chief technology officer, said in a statement to the Business Journal. “The South Bay provides a strong talent pool to support our business and we look forward to growing our team.”
Airbnb has already started recruiting new employees for this South Bay branch. The president of a San Jose-based commercial real estate firm, Mark Ritchie, is not entirely surprised by this news and stated that “it’s incumbent upon a lot of these groups now to have locations in both cities. […] The commute distance is too great and so many of the workers already live down this way, anyway.”
Currently one of the most highly valued startups in the world, Airbnb is viewing the San Jose location at WeWork as a temporary stop until 2020 when they expect to settle into a permanent space somewhere in the South Bay.
