Apple Hiring for New, Secretive Seattle Engineering Office

Apple (AAPL) reportedly is hiring for a new engineering office it’s begun to populate in Seattle, joining a number of other Silicon Valley-based IT heavyweights, including Google (GOOG), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Oracle (ORCL) and Salesforce (CRM) putting down stakes in Amazon’s (AMZN) and Microsoft’s (MSFT) back yard.

While the iPhone maker confirmed its new Seattle digs after observers noticed it posted two job openings over the weekend looking for engineers to work there, details about the facility, such as exactly where it’s located, still are a bit murky.

At this point, what’s known is that there are about 30 engineers working there, some of whom came from Union Bay Networks, a Seattle cloud networking startup funded with some $1.85 million in venture money in July 2013.

The Seattle Times reported that at least seven of Union Bay’s nine employees now work for Apple at an undisclosed location somewhere in the Seattle area. The Union Bay team itself was a byproduct of F5 Networks, including Benn Bollay, Union Bay’s former chief technology officer.

According to Bollay’s LinkedIn profile, he’s now an Apple manager. Last Friday, he posted a message on LinkedIn that he’s hiring for the Seattle office.

“Ever wanted to work at Apple, but didn’t want to live in Cupertino?” Bollay wrote. He described the opportunity as suitable for “talented multidisciplinary engineers to design and develop the core infrastructure services and environments driving every online customer experience at Apple ranging from iCloud to iTunes.”

Apple has declined to comment on whether it bought Union Bay, only offering its standard line that the company “buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”

GeekWire went so far as to visit the Union Bay Networks office in Seattle. The only person there was Union Bay chief executive Tom Hull, who wouldn’t say if Apple has bought the startup.

Bollay reportedly also sent an email to a Seattle tech community forum on Monday morning that said, “Apple is opening up a new office here in Seattle, and they have a couple openings that might be interesting to everyone.”

No matter how many people Apple ultimately employs in Seattle, it will be a plus for the community, which has lost some 2,700 jobs from Microsoft’s recent layoffs.