The trend is undeniable. Tech companies hailing from San Francisco are setting up shop in Vancouver to gain access to our strong talent base.
This trend shouldn’t surprise anyone. The strongest economic argument in Vancouver’s pitch to Amazon to build their HQ2 was that the city’s tech workers have the “lowest wages of all North American tech hubs.”
The fact is Vancouver is an affordable option for U.S. companies looking for an engineering footprint outside of their hometown headquarters.
One of those companies is San Francisco-headquartered fintech startup Chime. Chime delivers banking services through mobile phones and recently closed a fundraising that values the company at $14.5 billion.
Chime tested the Vancouver waters back in 2019 when they worked with Terminal to hire technical employees North of the border on a contract basis.
Apparently the temperature was just right. Chime officially announced that Vancouver’s talent pool and convenient time zone made it an ideal location for its first international office.
SEE ALSO: Six San Francisco Headquartered Tech Companies Hiring in Vancouver
“That timezone alignment with Vancouver coupled with the quality and calibre of talent was able to attract us there,” Chime co-founder and CTO Ryan King told Toronto’s BetaKit at the time. “So we’ve made a strategic choice that we’re going to double down on that and really expand the team out there really as fast as we can.”
The new office, Chime’s first outside of the United States and third overall, is being led by Engineering Manager Steve Mynett. Mynett has spent time at Hootsuite, Unbounce, and most recently Dapper Labs.
Chime’s new Vancouver outpost is currently home to 20 employees (fully remote during COVID-19) from their engineering team and they hope to have 100 by the end of 2021. Check out their open roles for Software Developers in Vancouver and meet them in-person online at the upcoming Tech Talent Canada Job Fair on February 24th.
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