(Updates with executive’s comment in fourth paragraph.)

Dec. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Facebook Inc., the world’s largest social-networking site, plans to open an engineering office in New York to recruit technical talent as it competes for workers ahead of a potential initial public offering.

The Facebook New York engineering office, the company’s first outside the West Coast, will open in early 2012, according to a statement today. Serkan Piantino, an engineering manager for teams that handle Facebook chat and messages, will lead the new office, the Palo Alto, California-based company said.

Facebook, which has more than 800 million users, is looking to woo engineering talent as bigger companies such as Google Inc. and Apple Inc. compete for the brightest minds. Earlier this month, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg visited Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to recruit potential engineers.

“Operating at such a large scale, and innovating as quickly as we do, we need to recruit the most talented engineers in the world,” Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering at Facebook, said in the statement.

Facebook is considering raising about $10 billion in an initial public offering that would value the company at more than $100 billion, a person with knowledge of the matter said earlier this week. The social-networking site may file for the IPO before the end of the year, said the person.

Closely held Facebook currently has about 100 employees in New York, including marketing and recruiting, Schroepfer said today at a press conference. Web start-ups such as Foursquare Labs Inc. and Tumblr Inc. are also based in New York. Facebook will begin accepting applications for jobs in the city immediately, according to the statement.

“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,” Schroepfer said.

--Editors: James Callan, Niamh Ring

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Womack in San Francisco at bwomack1@bloomberg.net;

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net.