As Chicago looks to land new offices from Amazon, Google and Apple, another well-known tech company just committed to growing its tech team in Chicago.
Foursquare announced Friday that it has opened a new engineering office in Chicago. Foursquare, which currently has a 10-person sales team in the Windy City, said it plans to hire five to six engineering roles this year, and plans to continue building its Chicago team out beyond 2018.
Foursquare, which launched in 2009, is a location intelligence company and app for finding places nearby to eat, drink, shop and visit. The company's Chicago outpost is at WeWork Kinzie.
As part of the announcement, Foursquare said it has hired Kyle Fowler as the company's Chicago engineering director. Fowler, who worked at Foursquare in the Bay Area from 2011 to 2017, spent the last 10 months as a software engineer at Uptake before taking the new Foursquare role.
"Chicago has a burgeoning tech scene filled with tech flagships — such as Groupon and GrubHub — as well as growing branches of companies like Salesforce and Uber," Foursquare SVP of engineering Matt Kamen wrote in a medium post. "There’s also an influx of impressive graduates filtering in from programs at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and Loyola University Chicago, to mention just a few."
Foursquare said that its Chicago office is the company's third largest after its New York City and San Francisco spaces. Some of Foursquare's open engineering roles in Chicago include Android Engineer, Data Scientist/Machine Learning Engineer, Hadoop Infrastructure Engineer, Senior Software Engineer and an iOS Engineer.
A handful of engineering roles certainly doesn't carry the same impact as landing an Amazon or Apple campus, but it does show that tech giants are paying attention to Chicago's tech scene.
