Facebook settles into its satellite Seattle office

With sweeping panoramic views of the Cascade Mountains, Puget Sound, and the Space Needle, Facebook's quickly growing Seattle team is setting up shop in its new high-rise office.

During an open house of the satellite office today, company high-ups and local politicians showed off the new digs and emphasized Facebook's plans to continue expanding past its Silicon Valley home base, according to TechFlash.

Now the social network's Northwest offices are just a stone's throw from Microsoft's and Amazon's headquarters, and eBay, Zynga, and Google's regional offices.

"Just a couple of years ago, the entire Facebook engineering team was in one building in Palo Alto, California," Facebook site director Ari Steinberg wrote in a news post today. "Seattle, with its deep pool of engineering talent just a short hop away from the Bay Area, was the logical choice."

Starting out with just a couple of employees in Seattle, the regional office quickly grew. Now, the Northwest team has more than 90 engineers working on a couple dozen projects, including the iOS app, Facebook Platform, site security, and spam prevention.

Besides Seattle, Facebook also has satellite offices in New York City and Austin.