Dive Brief:

• Alibaba is looking to Seattle for its U.S. human resources, according to information from Linkedin, Fortune magazine reports. The Chinese e-commerce giant has recently hired staff from Amazon and Microsoft for its cloud-computing efforts, and local recruiters say the company is interested in others from those companies and Facebook.

• Alibaba has also opened an engineering outpost in the area.

• The company hasn’t commented on such hires or recruitment, according to Fortune.

Dive Insight:

This is fitting, really, considering that Jack Ma famously got the spark that ultimately led to his development of Alibaba when he visited Seattle in the 1980s. 

“I’m sure they’re going to be web-based as well as mobile-type folks,” Jerry Taylor, president of Executive Recruiters Inc in Bellevue, WA, told Fortune. “They’re trying to get a footprint in the United States. What better place to go than their direct competitor in Amazon?”