To keep up with its growth, Facebook today announced plans to establish an engineering presence in New York City and tap into the technical talent that the region has to offer.

The Facebook NYC engineering office, the company's first outside the West Coast, will open in early 2012 and will begin accepting applications immediately.

The vast majority of Facebook s current 3,000 workers are at its headquarters in Palo Alto, California, and a satellite campus in Seattle.

"More than 800 million people around the world rely on Facebook, and more than half of them visit every day. Operating at such a large scale, and innovating as quickly as we do, we need to recruit the most talented engineers in the world," said Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's Vice President of Engineering. "New York has a strong history of innovation and is home to thousands of talented technical people, and we want them to help us solve the challenges of designing and building the next generation of Facebook," he added.

Facebook did not say how many engineers Facebook would employ in New York.

Potential applicants for the Facebook engineering team in NYC can review the first listing of available positions at https://www.facebook.com/nycjobs.