Boston headquartered Fidelity Investments is to create 300 jobs in the next two years as the company continues to expand.
The new full-time roles will be split between Galway and Dublin, with 200 of the roles linked to the Galway hub. Staff will be able to work flexibly but must be resident in Ireland due to taxation and employment regulations.
Among the new roles being filled are software engineering, cloud, and cyber security. There will also be a number of business operations roles in Dublin.
The expansion will grow the total number of people employed by the Irish operation to 1,800.
Fidelity Investments Ireland’s Lorna Martyn said the company expected to fill the role more quickly. “We would expect to probably fill most of those in the next 12 to 18 months. It’s probably conservative, just given the talent environment at the moment and some of the challenges.”
Recruitment is already under way, and the expansion will include a graduate programme, Fidelity said.
Ms Martin said the expansion was a vote of confidence in the Irish operation, despite the difficult macroeconomic environment. “It’s one of probably one of our great advantages of being privately held, where we can take a very long view in terms of what we need to do,” she said. “We actually were probably one of the few companies who announced growth at the start of the Covid phase.”
The company has a 25-year history in Ireland, but it is only in the past decade that it has seen significant growth here. In 2013, the company employed 400 people. A big shift came in 2015 and 2016, when it added another 300 staff with the opening of a new division. Last year, the company said it would add 90 jobs, mainly to its technology team, while a year earlier, it said it would create 100.
“We’re very much a technology enabled business. The one cornerstone of Fidelity has always been its innovation and its desire to be to be the number one in whatever field you’re in,” Ms Martyn said. “So this is really seen as a continued series of investment in terms of what’s next in terms of our business, how do we continue to become much more digitally enabled in the financial services space. This is a natural progression I think in terms of the faith in Ireland, that those jobs are spread across a number of areas where we have deep history in terms of being successful, and of getting the right skills.”
