Quora’s CEO Adam D’Angelo blogged yesterday that Mountain View’s Quora is opening their first international engineering office in Vancouver in early 2020.

We looked at many possible locations for this office, and decided on Vancouver for three reasons: First, our success as a company depends on our ability to hire the best engineers from around the world, and Canada’s strong immigration program will let us do that.

Second, it is important to be in a location where highly skilled technical people want to live. Vancouver is regularly rated as one of the cities with the highest quality of life in the world, and our research has confirmed this preference among the engineers we’re hiring.

Finally, Quora is a tightly-integrated product, so coordination in product development is extremely important to us. We’ll be able to continue this approach since Vancouver is in the same time zone as our Mountain View headquarters and just a short flight away.

According to D’Angelo, the Vancouver office will initially focus on machine learning initiatives but likely grow over time to house other engineering functions.

Quora’s machine learning teams work on a wide gamut of projects including language modelling for content quality, deep learning for personalization, and systems and platforms to make machine learning development easier.

The office will be seeded with a team of engineers from Mountain View and Quora is in the process of hiring the local team.

Founded in 2009, Quora is a question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, and edited by Internet users.