Facebook Announces Plans For New York Engineering Office

Facebook's engineering team is branching out to the Big Apple.

During an event at Facebook's New York City office on Friday, the company's COO Sheryl Sandberg joined Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Facebook engineering heads and other New York politicians to announce the social network's new move.

The Palo Alto-based company plans to establish its first engineering office in New York by early 2012 and is currently accepting applications for local talent.

“Building an engineering presence outside the West Coast is a big step for us, one we would take only if we found the right combination of talent and community support,” said Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, according to a press release.

"Silicon Valley companies are realizing that New York is the place that they have to be," Mayor Bloomberg said, as quoted by Business Insider. "We are home to success stories like Etsy, Gilt Groupe, Foursquare, and more... We want the next Facebook to start in New York City."

Venture Beat notes that the social network maintains two other engineering offices, both on the west coast of the U.S., one in Palo Alto, California, and the other in Seattle, Washington.

"It's a smart move on Facebook’s part," TechCrunch wrote of Facebook's plan. "The company will have competition for engineering — including the financial sector, Google (which has a large office in NYC) and the growing startup scene. But it shouldn’t have any trouble attracting top talent, as it still has its valuable pre-IPO stock to give out. In the longer term, it’s also good news for the New York tech scene as a whole."

Facebook is expected to file for an initial public offering before the end of 2011. According to a recent report, the company could seek to raise as much as $10 billion and may be valued as high as $100 billion.

Check out our slideshow (below) to see how a Facebook IPO might stack up to IPOs from Netflix, LinkedIn, Dream Works and other notable companies that went public in the last decade.