Shopify Creates Hundreds of New Jobs with Waterloo Expansion
Just 18 months into Shopify’s bet on the Kitchener-Waterloo region and the company is already looking to grow.
Shopify announced a new Waterloo expansion today which will create 300 to 500 new jobs over the next 2 to 3 years for their Plus operations. Shopify Plus is made up of sales, creative, product and technical teams. They are dedicated specifically to servicing Shopify’s high-profile and higher volume merchants with sales ranging from a few hundred thousand dollars to a billion dollars per year.
“We’ve seen a really great migration of merchants onto the Shopify Plus platform which has driven a lot of our growth over the last couple of years, and it is driving our expansion here in the region,” said Loren Padelford, a general manager with Shopify Plus.
“We look to hire a number of entry-level people, all the way to senior executive level talent – our team now is building software that is solving really complex problems for very large and complex businesses.”
It was September 2016 when Padelford cut the ribbon on the Shopify’s stunning 45,000-square-foot Waterloo Office; a turn-of-the-century whiskey distillery. Over the last year, the team has grown from 50 to more than 250 today, filling up the current office and forcing the new team into an additional 55,000 square feet in the neighboring 85 Willis Way. Just 70 meters from the Distillery office, Shopify is creating its own campus feel in their corner of Waterloo.
Padelford attributes the company’s rapid growth to the high-quality talent pool in the corridor. He’s hoping this expansion not only keeps young talent in the area, but also attracts global talent and welcomes Canadian expats back home from their tech tours abroad.
“We originally selected Waterloo because of the great talent pool and that’s allowed us to grow much faster than we anticipated. The corridor between Kitchener, Waterloo and Toronto continues to be, from my perspective, one of the greatest technical corridors in the world.”
The office is expected to open in early 2018.
