Looking to tap into some East Coast talent, Facebook has just announced that they will be opening a brand new engineering office in New York City. It will be their first engineering office outside the West Coast.

“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.”

Facebook Engineering NYC“Building an engineering presence outside the West Coast is a big step for us, one we would take only if we found the right combination of talent and community support. We’re particularly grateful for the encouragement and assistance of New York’s elected leaders, who understand what it takes to build a climate where technology can fuel economic growth and the creation of high skilled jobs.” — Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook Chief Operating Officer 1 hour ago · 3 likes · 0 comments

Facebook is putting Serkan Piantino at the helm, an engineer who has been with the company since 2007. Piantino led the team that was behind Facebook’s news feed and its upcoming Timeline feature.

It appears that the New York political muscle is thrilled with the plan, as Senator Chuck Schumer praised the decision as one that will “help to continue fueling innovation in the greatest city in the world.” New York’s other Senator Kirsten Gillibrand thinks that Facebook’s new presence will “help position New York City to lead in the high-tech economy of the future.”

NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg also praised the move:

Facebook is capitalizing on what more and more tech companies are realizing: that New York City is the best place in the world to recruit and retain a talented workforce The growth in the tech sector is creating jobs and further diversifying our economy. That’s why we are invested in expanding our engineering workforce by building a new applied sciences school in the city. We want to do everything we can to make sure that Facebook can grow here, and that the next Facebook will be founded here.

The new office will open up in the early part of 2012, but Facebook is already accepting applications. Their New York careers page already lists openings for software engineers in the fields of ads, data infrastructure, tools, and web performance.

In October, Twitter opened a brand new office right in the middle of Madison Avenue. That move was also praised by Bloomberg and Gillibrand as the right move in growing NYC’s technology sector.