Foursquare to open San Francisco office, hire engineers

Foursquare has just announced that it will be opening an office in San Francisco, its first office outside of New York City.

Apparently, Foursquare has been working out of the Square office in SF, and Square has agreed to give Foursquare a bit more space for a new team of engineers. We’re assuming that this will only be a temporary arrangement until Foursquare can find more permanent SF digs, but we’ll reach out to Foursquare to see if this is the case.

UPDATE: Foursquare got back to us and said:

Our goal is to hire engineers for our San Francisco office as quickly as possible to keep up with our rapidly growing user base.  For now, we’re happy to continue working out of Square’s office space.

Interestingly, in a blog post announcing the expansion, Foursquare doesn’t mention need to have a West Coast presence for business development / partnership reasons (which we suspect really isn’t an issue, especially as the startup’s director of business development Tristan Walker is already in Palo Alto), but instead is echoing the Google/Facebook theme of apparently having a hard time finding engineers, especially in NYC. So, in an effort to build out its staff more quickly, Foursquare apparently hopes to lure Bay Area developers to its exploding growth and possibly even away from other startups/established companies?

This summer, Foursquare closed a $20 million funding round, so it would make sense that it now has the capital to cover the overhead and expanded staff of a second office. If you’re in the Bay Area, are an engineer, and would like to work for Foursquare, the company currently has one listed job opening in SF: Server Side Software Developer, though we sure that that list will expand soon.