Zoom expands technical force in the US

Zoom on Thursday said it wants to hire 500 software engineers for research and development centers in the city of Phoenix in Arizona and Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania within the next two years, with the goal of expanding its force to about 60 %, according to Reuters.

Zoom saw a spike in the number of people using the company's online video application to connect and work when the Covid-19 epidemic forced them to stay at home. Zoom last month said the number of people participating in the daily online meeting application reached about 300 million, up sharply from 10 million in December 2019.

However, the sudden increase in traffic has revealed a number of privacy and security issues that caused Zoom to suspend development of new features for 90 days, instead focusing exclusively on addressing issues. fear. Zoom is also looking for additional cloud provider Oracle Corp to help handle volume.

Currently, the technical workforce of Zoom is largely divided between San Jose, California (USA) and China. Zoom's recruitment activities will start right now and new employees will work from home until at least September this year. The company has just added 20 engineers from Keybase, the encryption firm Zoom acquired last week. Zoom hopes the new team will have an immediate impact on the security of information on the application.

Kelly Steckelberg, Zoom's chief financial officer, said the company is looking for new offices near Arizona State University and Carnegie Mellon University to harness engineering talent from these universities. On the other hand, the new location in Arizona and Pennsylvania also helped Zoom hire engineers who were hesitant to move to Silicon Valley because of the high cost of living.