Palm seeks staff as it launches Dublin centre

Mobile company makes continental push

Mobile computing specialist Palm is recruiting mobile operating system programmers and engineers as part of an aggressive European growth plan.

The vendor needs mobile IT specialists to staff its first mobile engineering research and development (R&D) centre outside of the US, which opened in Dublin last month to serve local corporate customers and telecoms carriers.

‘We are looking for 35 engineers and have already hired eight for the first phase of the centre’s growth. We have 500 in the US centre, in comparison,’ said Jim O’Dea, Palm senior operations director.

‘We want a variety of skills. We’re looking for Palm operating system and Microsoft programmers and quality analysts who have worked in the world of mobile carriers and who are used to understanding the problems of networking,’ said O’Dea.

Despite having its own proprietary operating system, Palm recently entered into strategic partnerships with Microsoft and Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry smartphone.

‘We have chosen these companies as partners because we believe it gives us global reach,’ said Palm chief executive Ed Colligan at the centre’s launch.

O’Dea also stressed the importance of experience in understanding the European mobile carrier market in order to meet their varied certification criteria.

He says the ideal candidates should want to relocate to Ireland, have the technical know-how and language capabilities, but that 15 to 20 per cent of the next crop of new recruits will also be local or overseas graduates.