Square opens St. Louis office, plans to hire 200
Lisa Brown / St. Louis Post-Dispatch : Tweets: @govjaynixon and @stlpartnership Tweets: Governor Jay Nixon / @govjaynixon : Great news for #STL's growing tech scene. @Square to open permanent location & create 200 jobs in CWE @CortexSTL http://www.stltoday.com/... @stlpartnership : #StLouis born @Square returns home for new office, 100's of new jobs at @CortexSTL. Big thx to founders @2000F @Jack! http://www.stltoday.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Square is returning to the hometown of founders Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey (@2000F) with a permanent office in the Cortex innovation district in St. Louis' Central West End, a move Governor Jay Nixon and the St. Louis Partnership are publicly championing as a milestone for the region's tech scene. The timing matters: weeks later, Square would file publicly for an IPO on $560.6M of first-half revenue, making this hiring push part of the scale-up story it pitched to public-market investors.
The St. Louis site also foreshadows how Square grew beyond San Francisco — by late 2018 it had leased all of the office space at Oakland's Uptown Station with room for up to 2,000 staff, confirming a deliberate multi-hub footprint rather than a one-city company.
First-order effects
- St. Louis gains 200 planned jobs concentrated in the Cortex/CWE corridor, and Square gets a lower-cost engineering base in a market where state and civic leaders (Nixon, Stl Partnership) are actively recruiting it.
Second-order effects
- The move pressures other Bay Area payments and fintech employers to consider satellite offices in secondary cities to compete for talent on cost, a playbook Square itself extended with the full-building Oakland lease two years later.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, mid-size metros with anchor institutions like Cortex compete for corporate engineering hubs as a development strategy, redistributing tech employment away from coastal headquarters — with local incentive packages becoming a standard tool.
The trend: Payments companies are distributing engineering headcount across second-tier US metros, trading Bay Area concentration for cost and civic incentives as they scale toward and past their public listings.