• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, December 2, 2011

Facebook on Friday said it will open an engineering office in New York City early next year, its first outside the West Coast. The engineering group will be located within the company’s existing Madison Avenue office in New York, where it employs about 100 mostly sales staff.

“New York has a strong history of innovation and is home to thousands of talented technical people, and we want them to help us solve the challenges of designing and building the next generation of Facebook,” said Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s VP and president of engineering at Facebook, in a statement. To that end, the company has listed available positions at https://www.facebook.com/nycjobs.

For updates on the engineering office, people can also “Like” the Facebook page for NYC Engineering at https://www.facebook.com/fbnyc. Facebook has not specified how many engineering hires it plans to make initially. “We’ve been seeing strong demand for a Facebook engineering presence in the Northeast, and we’ll grow our team over time to meet that demand,” said a company spokesperson.