Zoom to open research and development offices in Pittsburgh, Phoenix
Zoom announced Thursday that it plans to open new research and development offices in Phoenix, Arizona and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Both cities are known for housing premier engineering programs -- Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and Arizona State University in Phoenix.
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Zoom plans to recruit software engineers from both universities and said the offices will be located near the campuses. The two centers will add to Zoom's existing R&D efforts and support engineering leadership based in San Jose, the company said.
"Both Phoenix and Pittsburgh have incredibly well-educated, skilled, and diverse talent pools that are well-positioned to help support Zoom's ongoing growth and continued success," said Zoom CEO Eric Yuan. "We plan to hire up to 500 software engineers between these two cities in the next few years, drawing largely on recent graduates of the many local universities. We look forward to expanding our team and seeing what we accomplish together as we continue to build our world-leading video communications platform with best-in-class reliability, scalability, privacy, and security."
The R&D expansion comes at busy time for Zoom. The company was an early beneficiary of the videoconferencing boom spurred by the novel coronavirus pandemic. Usage of its platform grew from 10 million daily meeting participants back in December to more than 300 million today.
The company is also in the midst of a 90-day push to improve the security posture of its platform. To that end, Zoom announced last week that it was buying Keybase, makers of an end-to-end encrypted messaging and cloud storage system. With Keybase, Zoom plans to offer an end-to-end encrypted meeting mode on all paid accounts.
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