Barcelona has become a first-rate technological hub that attracts some of the world’s leading companies. Apple, which opened its new offices last December on Passeig de Gràcia in Barcelona in the refurbished modernist Palau Pons i Pasqual building, opposite the Apple Store, is going to increase its AIML team – an acronym in English for artificial intelligence and learning automatic – with the hiring of new engineers in this specialty.
The Barcelona offices, where several hundred people work, constitute the largest AIML team that the apple company has in Europe, and now it is opening a call for 40 engineers to incorporate them into this headquarters. Apple has offices in Madrid and Barcelona, ??in addition to 11 stores in various Spanish cities. At the end of 2021, it had 2,025 employees in Spain, 20% more than in 2022.
The Apple team in Barcelona is led by its senior engineer, the Catalan Elisenda Bou-Balust, who has been awarded the 2022 Princess of Girona Business Foundation award for having become a “world leader” in this field.
Bou-Balust, who has collaborated with NASA, MIT and Google, founded Vilynx in 2013, an intelligent software company to index and tag videos in internet searches that in 2020 became the first Spanish start-up acquired by Apple. “We continue to invest in Spain and increase our team,” he says. Thanks to the excellent local talent we are building a top-level engineering team in Barcelona”.
At this moment, Bou-Balust is in the process of searching for engineers for Apple, where he affirms that they have “the opportunity to work together with the best professionals in the sector in an inclusive and diverse environment.” The company points out that, in addition to direct jobs, the economy of the app sector for its operating systems contributes to supporting another 120,000 indirect jobs.
In addition to Apple, in recent years several leading technology companies have established centers in Barcelona. Last year, Microsoft opened an AI R&D headquarters in the city that now has about 90 employees. Google has also opened offices this year and Amazon has extensive facilities in the 22@ district with specialists in artificial intelligence.
