WAYFAIR, a household products company competing with Amazon for e-commerce customers, is opening an office in Seattle and plans to hire more than 200 technical staff.
These plans were announced in an internal memo sent to WAYFAIR employees this week. The company previously announced that it would open engineering sites in San Francisco Bay, Austin and Toronto and employ 1000 technicians.
This is WAYFAIR’s first expansion outside its headquarters in Boston and Berlin.
WAYFAIR currently lists 28 positions in Seattle, including software engineer, product manager, experience designer, analysis and data scientist. The office is scheduled to open in 2022, but recruitment will begin immediately, starting remotely.
WAYFAIR has not yet decided on the location of the office. The company has a distribution warehouse in Kent as part of its logistics network, including 18 fulfillment and 38 delivery centers in the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom.
Related report: geekwire’s list of Seattle area engineering outposts.
Of its 16000 employees, 3000 held technical positions in WAYFAIR, established in 2002. The company said it served 29 million active customers, provided 22 million household products from more than 16000 suppliers, and achieved net revenue of $14.1 billion in the fiscal year ended September 30.
As far as Andy Jassy is concerned, all these constitute Amazon’s competition. In an interview with CNBC in September, the CEO of Amazon rejected the rumors that the technology giant was a monopoly and was ripe for antitrust review.
“We compete with very large companies,” jasi said. “These companies include Wal Mart, target and Kroger, as well as some very successful digital companies such as eBay, Etsy and WAYFAIR. We are not able to raise prices in any unrestricted way. In fact, if you look at our usual practices, we will continue to reduce prices because these markets are highly competitive s“