Twitter is joining the ranks of Microsoft, Google and Facebook and expanding North along the West coast, up into Seattle.

As Forbes reports, Twitter has just opened a new office in Seattle. The new office is located near Pike Place Market.

This is the fifth engineering office for Twitter, along with its offices in Silicon Valley, New York, London and Tokyo.

In typical Twitter fashion, they announced the grand opening of this new office in a tweet:

Hello, Seattle, home to such great engineering talent. We’re excited to move into a small shared office here. #jointheflock

— Twitter Engineering (@TwitterEng) June 4, 2012

As GeekWire points out, Twitter has had employees in the Seattle area since 2010 after it acquired CloudHopper. CloudHopper’s Joe Lauer will be working from the new offices, along with a four other Twitter employees. There are plans to grow this office with more hires over the next several months.

In April of this year Twitter opened a sales office in in Detroit targeted at getting those big-spending car companies on board buying up 140-character ads. And before that, in January, they opened their third European office in Germany.

The new Seattle office comes as Twitter expands its workforce. The company just hit 1,049 employees this week, up from about 900 in January. The big hiring binge has been going on since about November of last year – in seven months, Twitter has hired about 340 new employees, growing at a rate of about 1.5 per day.

(Seattle image via Shutterstock)