By Echo Wang
(Reuters) – TikTok has plans to hire about 3,000 engineers over the next three years, mostly in Europe, Canada and Singapore, the company told Reuters on Tuesday.
The move shows that the popular short-video app has not given up on its expansion plans despite lingering uncertainty over its ownership. President Donald Trump has ordered China’s ByteDance to divest TikTok amid concerns over the safety of the personal data it handles.
“To support our rapid global growth, we plan to continue expanding TikTok’s global engineering team, including adding approximately 3,000 engineers in Canada, Europe, Singapore, as well as the U.S., over the next three years,” a TikTok spokesman said.
The United States will remain one of the engineering hubs for the company and hire more staff, the spokesman added.
There are about 1,000 engineers currently working for TikTok outside of China, nearly half of them based in Mountain View, California.
Reuters previously reported that ByteDance plans to invest billions of dollars and recruit hundreds of employees in Singapore, which it has selected as its Southeast Asia headquarters.
Trump said last month that a preliminary deal for Oracle Corp <ORCL.N> and Walmart Inc <WMT.N> to take stakes in TikTok had his “blessing,” but a formal deal has not materialized after ByteDance said it would not relinquish a majority stake in the app.
A judge will consider on Nov. 4 whether the U.S. government will be allowed to ban downloads of TikTok from U.S. app stores, a move that ByteDance has warned would effectively ban its use in the United States.
(Reporting by Echo Wang in New York; Editing by Bernadette Baum)
