It’s been five years since New York-based Squarespace opened a customer care center in Portland and now the company is looking to expand the roles in this office.
The 150-person office has stayed a steady size for several years, said CEO Anthony Casalena on a recent visit to the Rose City Outpost. It consists mostly of employees who address customer issues through either live chats or email, but that is changing.
The company is now hiring engineers for this office. It’s looking for folks in site reliability engineering and server infrastructure, Casalena said.
The expanded roles are the result of a couple of key engineering leadership hires out of the Portland talent pool.
“Right now the main headquarters is New York (with) offices in Portland and Dublin, Ireland,” Casalena told the Business Journal. “Now we really think with the right local leaders we can increase the number of disciplines in the offices.”
It’s a familiar progression for Portland, which is home to several satellite offices for larger tech companies. Peer-to-peer hospitality site Airbnb, which came to Portland in 2014 as well, had a similar path in Portland. It opened an office that was largely customer care operations but has since expanded the team to roughly 400 and added engineering and product employees.
Squarespace expects to hire a dozen or more engineers as part of its 2020 plans.
Casalena said as the company has become more familiar with the talent pool in Portland, especially for engineers, it made sense to add the roles in the office. Aside from any new roles in the Portland office, the company has nine other roles open in Portland in customer care.
Squarespace has an online software platform that helps customers build their own websites. Earlier this month it acquired the company Unfold, which has templates for people to create Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat stories. It’s the company’s first foray into helping customers create content for social media.
Casalena said Unfold’s customer care support will be absorbed by Squarespace’s existing care teams like the one in Portland.