A new satellite office in Victoria will help Change.org, the world’s largest online petition platform, develop their tools to empower social change. The company recently expanded their team in Canada and formed the office in Victoria by bringing on six principal engineers from social game developer Zynga.
Tim Catlin, Change.org’s vice president of Engineering says these hires mark the first global expansion of the company’s product team.
“Since Victoria is a growing tech hub with the talent and the ecosystem, it made perfect sense to open an operation here,” Catlin says. “The team of seasoned local engineers will augment the US product team as the company starts to solve the platform’s biggest infrastructure challenges, and expand the suite of social impact tools.”
Chris Campbell of the new Victoria office announced — during a live Q&A at Viatec’s Experience Techtoria —that the team is planning on recruiting in Victoria. In a follow-up interview with Douglas, he said the first order of business is upgrading the site architecture but that there will be lots off interesting projects to tackle after that.
“The company’s mission is to enable people to create the changes they want to see in the world and you can think of that much more broadly than just petitions,” he says. “Petitions are the tool we’ve been focusing on the past couple of years and they’ve really taken off, but the mission is really about more than that and there are other tools on the roadmap to build.”
Headquartered in San Francisco, Change.org has offices in 18 countries. The company first moved into Canada in 2012 with an office in Montreal, and already there are over 2.7 million Canadian users who’ve launched over 24,000 petitions from Newfoundland to Vancouver. Some the more popular Change.org campaigns in Canada include freeing a Canadian filmmaker and doctor from arbitrary detention in Egypt; and, most recently, keeping Walmart out of Kensington market, one of Toronto’s most loved neighbourhoods.
