• May 6, 2010

Facebook plans to open an engineering office in Seattle this summer, with the aim of hiring "a handful of stellar engineers to form the initial team," according to a post today by Ari Steinberg, an engineering manager at Facebook.

The move marks the latest expansion into the Pacific Northwest after the social network earlier this year announced plans to build its own data center in central Oregon. By adding an office in Seattle, Facebook will be able to tap into the high-tech talent drawn by companies like Microsoft and Amazon as well as an established startup culture.

To help recruit local "super-star" engineers, the company has already brought on serial entrepreneur Hadi Partovi. He was most recently co-founder of music recommendation service iLike, acquired last year by Facebook rival MySpace.

Facebook now has more than one engineer for each 1 million users. With 400 million users, that means at least 400 engineers and more like 1,300, according to Inside Facebook.

For his part, Steinberg admitted he couldn't stand to live 800 miles from TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, who yesterday announced his own move from Silicon Valley to Seattle. --Mark Walsh