Online home decor shopping platform Wayfair Inc. is branching out from its Boston roots and opening offices in Austin, the Bay Area and Toronto — three of the hottest tech hubs in North America.
Overall, the publicly traded company plans to hire about 1,000 people for engineering roles across the new offices. That includes about 200 positions for the Austin office over the next year, including software engineers, infrastructure engineers, product managers, experience designers, analysts and data scientists.
Wayfair has already posted 15 jobs for its Austin location, including head of machine learning engineering, executive assistant, software engineer and product manager roles. The company picked Austin for the strong technical talent in the area, and is currently looking for an office space for its Austin operations.
The new offices come as the company is also ramping up hiring at its Boston headquarters and in Berlin, where it has its European HQ. The company has about 16,000 employees in total, including positions in warehouses, distribution, tech and operations.
Wayfair (NYSE: W) is among companies that seem to have benefited from dramatic changes in consumer behavior stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic and federal stimulus check rollout. Its stock has roughly tripled since this time last year as people were stuck at home and decided to invest in their homes and redesigned offices. Wayfair logged about $14 billion in revenue last year, and, as of Wednesday, it had a $33.2 billion market cap.
The company also recently committed $20 million to the Black Economic Development Fund, which invests in Black-led businesses to generate more access to capital for Black founders and expand economic opportunities in Black communities.
Wayfair co-founder and CEO Niraj Shah has also signed the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion pledge, which calls for executives to develop educational programs to ensure employees understand unconscious bias and to create smart diversity and inclusion plans and create accountability systems to track progress.
A company spokesperson said the company works with reacHIRE, an organization focused on helping women return to the workforce after taking a career break, as well as Apprenti, Year Up, Boston While Black, Jopwell, HackDiversity and others. Wayfair said it plans to connect with Austin organizations for potential collaboration, as well.
But the company has also faced backlash. In 2019, hundreds of its employees walked out in protest over a conflict about Wayfair's contract to furnish facilities where migrant children were being detained.
Austin has become one of the hottest cities in the nation for satellite offices, regional headquarters and headquarters relocations across a broad variety of tech-oriented industries.
That includes massive expansions by the likes of Google, Facebook, Tesla, Oracle and Apple. But it's not just the giants. Crypto mining startup Blockcap, for example, moved its HQ to Austin recently. It has about 20 employees, with plans to grow to 50 to 100 over nine months. And AI-powered small business platform Markaaz Inc., also recently moved to Austin from Los Angeles with plans to hire 70 more employees within a year.
