Wayfair is opening an office in Toronto and will be hiring for hundreds of jobs

The American e-commerce juggernaut Wayfair, best known for selling furniture from third-party retailers around the globe (think Amazon meets IKEA) has announced plans to open three new engineering hubs in North America, one of which will be right here in Toronto.

Wayfair Canada general manager Jeremy King confirmed the news to Retail Insider this week, noting that the company plans to hire approximately 1,000 new technologists over the next year alone.

The aforementioned new offices in Toronto, Austin and San Francisco will initially hire for about 200 positions each, allowing Wayfair to beef up its "engineering organization," which is currently run out of two "technical home bases" in Boston and Berlin.

"We looked at a variety of cities for these new locations. Toronto is a world-class city with high-calibre universities, infrastructure and community institutions," said King to Retail Insider.

"We're thrilled to contribute to the energy and culture of the city, and have been impressed by the strong technical talent in the area... expanding the team into rich tech hubs like Toronto will help us meet our ambitious goals for the Wayfair platform and expand upon the level of technology excellence seen in our U.S. and E.U. hubs."

Among the roles Wayfair will be hiring for locally are software engineers, product managers, experience designers, analysts and data scientists — all high-paying tech jobs that Toronto, as an established North American tech hub, is well-suited to fill.

Wayfair, which last year became the subject of a bizarre (and untrue) conspiracy theory involving human trafficking, was founded in 2002 and has since grown to become one of the world's leading online furniture retailers.

The Massachusetts company generated some $14.1 billion in net revenue in 2020 alone through Wayfair.com and the other retail websites it owns: Birch Lane, Perigold, Joss & Main and AllModern.

While the corporation does already have a large warehouse in Mississauga, the Toronto engineering site will be the first corporate office for Wayfair in Canada.

Neither an expected opening date nor any potential locations have yet been announced, but Wayfair joins a growing pool of global tech companies that have recently announced their intentions to set up offices in Toronto, including TikTok, Netflix, DoorDash and Reddit.