Freelancer.com Opens Vancouver Engineering Lab

Freelancer.com has officially opened the doors of its Vancouver engineering lab which will support its rapid growth locally and across the globe.

Freelancer.com is the world’s largest online freelancing marketplace with over 10.4 million professionals from 234 countries, regions and territories. Freelancer currently employs over 350 staff globally, with offices in Sydney, London, Manila, Buenos Aires and Jakarta.

The Australian company is planning to hire in the short term 20 staff in its devops and software engineering teams. In addition, a number of key hires will be made in engineering management, regional communications, public relations and support.

Over 5.5 million projects have been posted on Freelancer.com to date across over 650 areas of work including web design, graphic design, copywriting through to fields as esoteric as astrophysics, aerospace engineering, manufacturing and biotechnology.

In November 2013, Freelancer.com listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX: FLN) in the biggest opening ever for an IPO on that exchange (up 400%) and was briefly valued at over $1 billion.

Freelancer has long recognized Canada as a key market. In 2012, Freelancer acquired Scriptlance, a Canadian startup that achieved considerable success in the online outsourcing and crowdsourcing space. Scriptlance was started by Canadian entrepreneur René Trescases who built the platform into the largest Canadian freelance outsourcing marketplace, and the 5th largest globally at the time.

Flying into Vancouver to open the office, Freelancer.com Chief Executive Matt Barrie sat down with Techvibes to share the news.

“Vancouver is a fantastic place to open our first office in North America. The city is rapidly becoming a booming tech hub, attracting some of the best companies in Canada. There is an amazingly vibrant startup ecosystem, and it’s a community we are excited to now be a part of.”

“The technical talent in Vancouver is some of the best in the world and we are looking forward to welcoming them to our global team. We are hiring rapidly and we are here to stay.”

Check out Freelancer.com’s career opportunities on the Techvibes Job Board.