RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, North Carolina — In the past few weeks, Apple has posted a flurry of jobs for its planned outpost in the Research Triangle, a review of the company's jobs board show.
The dozens of job postings are the latest sign of the iPhone maker's looming ramp-up in the Triangle, where it plans to hire thousands of workers in the next few years. The company has so far kept mostly quiet about its strategic plans for its future Research Triangle Park office.
Last April, Apple announced it would build a corporate campus in RTP that would eventually be home to 3,000 employees. The announcement came after the state agreed to give the company the largest incentive package in the history of the state — worth nearly $1 billion, The News & Observer previously reported.
State records show that Apple is expected to reach those 3,000 jobs over a 10-year period from 2023 to 2033. The RTP jobs are expected to pay on average $187,000 a year.
Apple's office in RTP likely won't be completed for years, though, and plans submitted to the Town of Cary last year showed the company will likely open a temporary office there.
The company submitted plans last summer to renovate around 200,000 square feet of space in one of the MetLife towers off Weston Parkway, The N&O previously reported.
A majority of the postings now online are for roles within the company's Apple Pay team, which is looking for software engineers, data engineers, marketing specialists and vendor relationship managers.
Apple Pay is a service that lets iPhone users create digital wallets on their phones, send money and make contactless purchases at stores.
Apple has not yet responded to requests for comment. But the company is investing heavily in improving its Apple Pay services.
On Tuesday, the company announced a new feature that would let iPhone accept payments for the first time, essentially turning iPhones into mobile payment terminals that small businesses and entrepreneurs could use.
Many small businesses currently use companies like Square, which make payment terminals that plug into iPhones and iPads or connect via Bluetooth to accept payments.
Some of the job postings note the opportunities will be a hybrid of in-office or remote work and give applicants a choice between Raleigh and Austin, Texas, where Apple employs thousands of workers.
Other postings do not give the option of working in Austin.
In December, Apple delayed its return to the office indefinitely because of rising COVID-19 cases around the country, CNBC reported. It had previously planned to reopen offices in February.
Outside of the Apple Pay team, other roles posted for the Raleigh office include real estate positions, a construction manager, a university relations coordinator and Apple Cloud engineering.
Google, Amazon and Microsoft are growing too
In addition to Apple, Google is opening a cloud computing hub in Durham, where it hopes to have 1,000 employees in the coming years, The N&O reported.
Google has already hired its site lead for the Durham office — N.C. State University alum Kamala Subramaniam — and has more than 100 jobs posted across the Triangle, according to its own jobs board.
Amazon, which notably considered the Triangle during its HQ2 search, has also posted dozens of software development and solutions architect opportunities in recent weeks that mention Raleigh or Durham.
Most of the jobs are considered remote positions, but a few of the postings note that Amazon is "in process of locating office space in the area of North Carolina, Research Triangle Park." The Triangle Business Journal first reported those Amazon job descriptions.
Amazon declined to comment about the job postings.
Fellow Washington state tech giant Microsoft is also growing its presence here at an office near Raleigh-Durham International Airport. The company has nearly 200 job postings in the Triangle, though a large majority of them give applicants the chance to select from multiple office locations.
In 2019, Microsoft said it would eventually employ 500 people in Wake County, after the state gave it incentives worth more than $14.8 million, The N&O previously reported.
The growth of these tech giants in the Triangle has been greeted with both celebration and anxiety.
Economic developers have lauded the arrival of jobs that pay well over the local average as well as their potential to attract more talented workers to the state. But many residents have expressed concern that those high salaries will make the region unaffordable for many.
The growth is also creating more competition for existing tech companies in the region.
In January, Todd Olson, the CEO of Raleigh software startup Pendo, told the Raleigh Chamber of Commerce that the local labor market is at a boiling point because of the pandemic and competing offers from the likes of Apple and Google.
"We have to compete with Apple and Google, day in and day out," Olson said at the conference.
Olson added that many local workers are also choosing to take remote jobs with companies based in California and New York. "The reality is that a lot ... of people want the flexibility of working remotely," he said.
It could end up taking a while for that dynamic to work itself out in the Triangle.
"There is no doubt that in the short term it could be painful" for local tech companies, Ted Zoller, a professor of entrepreneurship at UNC's Kenan-Flagler School of Business, told The N&O last year. "But in the long term, it could be the best thing to happen. We are no longer a flyover city anymore. This will make us a major player."
