Twitter to set up engineering centre in Singapore and hire people for 65 high-tech roles

SINGAPORE - Social media platform Twitter said on Thursday (Feb 13) it will set up its first Asia Pacific engineering centre in Singapore and create 65 technical jobs.

The centre, part of its expansion in this high growth region, will be sited at the company's Asia-Pacific headquarters in the CapitaGreen building in Shenton Way.

It will strengthen Twitter's global engineering capabilities as well as improve service availability and reliability for users, the company said.

The 65 new hires in the next few years will be in product engineering, software engineering, data engineering and data science.

The company set up its Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore in 2015 and the following year, established its first international data science team here.

"Asia-Pacific has always been a growth engine for our company and this new engineering centre is a strategic investment that demonstrates our commitment to this important region where people, partners and brands come every day to see what's happening in the world and to talk about it," said Twitter's vice president of Asia-Pacific, Ms Maya Hari.

"We are thrilled to bring some of the best, cutting-edge engineering jobs for a global Internet platform to Singapore, from product development to data science to machine learning," she said.

Twitter's announcement comes a week after it reported total revenue of US$3.46 billion (S$4.8 billion) for last year, an increase of 14 per cent over the previous year. Its net profit was US$1.47 billion.

The company had said, when announcing its results, that it expects to grow headcount by 20 per cent or more this year, especially in engineering, product, design and research.

"Twitter's move demonstrates confidence in Singapore as a world-class engineering talent hub, and will create exciting, new job opportunities for Singapore and Singaporeans," said Mr Kiren Kumar, chief digital industry officer at Digital Industry Singapore, a joint office of government agencies Economic Development Board, Enterprise Singapore and Info-communications Media Development Authority.

This article was first published in The Straits Times. Permission required for reproduction.