Wayfair, a 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 workers.
The plans were announced in an internal memo sent to Wayfair employees this week. The company previously announced that it will open engineering locations and hire 1,000 technologists in the San Francisco Bay Area, Austin, and Toronto.
The expansion is Wayfair’s first time going beyond its headquarters locations in Boston and Berlin.
Yes 28 jobs listed for Seattle on the Wayfair site right now, including roles such as software engineer, product manager, experience designer, analyst, and data scientist. The office is slated to open in 2022, but hiring will begin immediately, with roles starting remotely.
Wayfair has yet to make a decision on where to locate the office. The company has a distribution warehouse in Kent, Wash., as part of a logistics network that includes 18 fulfillment centers and 38 delivery centers across the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom.
Of its 16,000 employees, 3,000 work in technology roles for Wayfair, which was founded in 2002. the company said it serves 29 million active customers, offers 22 million home products from more than 16,000 suppliers, and posted net sales of $14.1 billion for the year ended September 30.
All of that creates competition for Amazon as far as Andy Jassy sees it. Amazon CEO, in a September interview with CNBC, has resisted calls that the tech giant is a monopoly and is 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 way unregulated. . In fact, if you look at what we normally do, we’re constantly lowering our prices because there’s a lot of competition in these markets.”
