Stripe to hire more than 100 remote Software Engineers

Online payments company Stripe is to hire more than 100 remote software engineers, but the catch is that almost all of them will be based in North America.

The company established by Limerick-born brothers Patrick and John Collison has announced plans to establish a remote engineering hub to work alongside its other facilities in San Francisco, Seattle, Dublin and Singapore.

“We are doing this to situate product development closer to our customers, improve our ability to tap the 99.74 per cent of talented engineers living outside the metro areas of our first four hubs, and further our mission of increasing the GDP of the internet,” said Stripe’s Belfast-born head of engineering, David Singleton in a blog post.

He said that while the company eventually hopes to hire remote engineers for its Dublin and Singapore hubs, the facilities, which both opened last year, aren’t mature enough to support such workers currently.

“In our first phase, we will be focused primarily on remote engineers in North America, starting with the US and Canada. While we are confident that great work is possible within close time zones, we don’t yet have structures to give remotes a reliably good experience working across large time zone differences,” said Mr Singleton.

“Though we intend to hire remote engineers in Europe and Asia eventually, our hubs in Dublin and Singapore are not sufficiently established to support remotes just yet,” he added.

Subscription billing service

Stripe, which last week rolled out its subscription billing service in Europe, recently confirmed plans to create hundreds of additional engineering jobs in Dublin to coincide with it securing an e-money licence from the Central Bank.

The company, which last month acquired Irish payments start-up Touchtech, employs more than 1,000 people globally, including more than 150 in Dublin.

Established in 2009 and now valued at $22.5 billion, Stripe handles billions of dollars in transactions each year and counts the likes of Amazon, Uber, Booking.com, Deliveroo and Google among its customers.

Apple to add $1 billion Texas campus and Create Thousands of Jobs in the U.S.

Apple said that it would expand its operations in Austin, Texas, with a new $1 billion campus on the north side of the city that would nearly double the size of the company’s current 6,000-employee workforce in the area.

The technology giant said it also planned to establish new, 1,000-worker operations in San Diego, Seattle and Culver City, California, and to add hundreds of workers in offices in New York, Pittsburgh and Boulder, Colorado, over the next three years.

The new 133-acre campus in North Austin will initially employ 5,000 workers in engineering, research and development, operations, finance, sales and customer support. It will ultimately have the capacity to accommodate up to 15,000 workers. Apple said it expected that its expanded presence would make it the area’s largest employer.

“Apple is proud to bring new investment, jobs and opportunity to cities across the United States and to significantly deepen our quarter-century partnership with the city and people of Austin,” Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said in a statement.

Apple had become synonymous with hoarding money overseas after deferring tax payments on its foreign earnings for years. In January, it said that it would increase its spending in the United States substantially after last year’s tax cuts led it to bring back most of the $252 billion it had stashed abroad.

The company said at the time that it planned to invest more than $30 billion in the United States over the next five years and to create 20,000 jobs by expanding its operations and adding a new campus.

UAE-Based Gulftainer and US port deal to Create thousands of Jobs

UAE-based independent port operator and logistics company Gulftainer’s $600 million concession to develop and operate the port of Wilmington in the US state of Delaware is a “really big deal” for the state and has the potential to create thousands of jobs, according to Delaware Secretary of State Jeffrey Bullock.

The ports deal, which was signed by Gulftainer subsidiary GT USA in late September, marks the largest ever run by a UAE company in the United States, as well as the largest investment ever made by a private UAE company in the country.

Speaking to Arabian Business during a recent visit to the UAE, Bullock said that the deal has the potential to create “double-digit growth in the number of jobs”, although he declined to give a specific forecast. 

“If you just run the models, the economic activity can double the growth of jobs [in and around the port,” he said. “Current direct and indirect unemployment around the port is currently about 5,000 or 6,000.

“Our first priority is to maintain the employment we already have, and then provide a path forward for the port to grow. We’ve accomplished [these goals] and the third is to create new jobs. We’ll see job creation. Whether it’s 1,000 jobs or 5,000 jobs remains to be seen,” he added

Plans for the port also include the development of cargo terminal capabilities, as well as the establishment of a training facility for the ports and logistics industries that are expected to train and upskill as many as 1,000 people each year.

Bullock added that the deal – and others like it – can help bridge the cultural gap between the US and UAE.

“It’s very powerful. Some of the hesitation in the United States is kind of from the fear of the unknown,” he said. “We are different and that’s okay. But we have a lot more similarities than differences.”

Hinduja Global Solutions to generate 500 Jobs in the US

 Hinduja Global Solutions, a global business process management major, announced the opening of its first customer experience centre in the US state of Florida which is expected to generate nearly 500 jobs

The centre, located in Jacksonville, will bring more than 350 new career opportunities in the first phase of expansion starting this month, the company said in a statement.

"We are excited to bring economic growth and job opportunities to the region and look forward to welcoming highly talented customer service people to the HGS team," said Tim Schuh, HGS President, North America.

HGS is aggressively growing onshore across industries, growing its North American employee base by more than 40 per cent in the last 12 months.

Part of the Hinduja Group, HGS has over 44,854 employees across 75 delivery centres in seven countries. For the financial year ending on March 31, 2018, HGS reported revenue of $597 million.