Square, the startup that revolutionized credit card payments for small businesses, plans to start adding engineers to its workforce in St. Louis. The company this year pledged to create 300 jobs here over the next five years.
Founded by St. Louis natives Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey in 2009, the San Francisco-based company launched the latest version of its credit card and mobile payment processing system, called Square Terminal, on Thursday.
St. Louis was one of three cities, along with New York and San Francisco, selected as a test site for the new technology. Dorsey, who is also co-founder and CEO of Twitter, said Square plans to tap engineering talent for new jobs in St. Louis.
“The dimension we’re adding now is engineering in St. Louis,” said Dorsey. “Ideally, it will become a big part — 40 percent of our workforce here. We will have new products in development here.”
Jesse Dorogusker, head of hardware at Square, said the company does all of its product design in-house.
“We’ve done our own design and engineering of hardware and software from the very beginning,” he said. “We think it’s really an essential part of making spectacular integrated products.”
Square opened its office in St. Louis three years ago in the Cortex Innovation District with customer support and risk operations staff. Square says the company has 455 employees.
Dorogusker said they don’t plan to move engineering staff here from San Francisco.
“For the first time we’re going to hire engineers here … and build a great engineering team with the great engineers who are already here in the city.”
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