Clover Network, the small-business payment processing arm of credit card giant First Data, plans to more than double the size of its technology operation in Colorado Springs to 125 employees by the end of next year.
The 45-employee unit added 22 workers to the Colorado Springs office last year, plans to add 29 employees this year and an additional 50 in 2020, according to a news release from the Colorado Springs Chamber & EDC. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Clover this month moved into 16,000 square feet of office space in the former Verizon software development complex at 2424 Garden of the Gods Road and plans to add another 10,000 square feet there this year.
Clover is seeking software engineers, software development engineers specializing in testing, developer operations personnel, technical account managers, technical writers, developer relations team members and quality assurance specialists, the chamber release said. For more information and to apply for the openings, go to https://www.clover.com/careers/all.
“We recruit nationwide, but most of our employees for the Colorado Springs office come from the surrounding area. We are looking for candidates with a computer science, engineering or coding background,” said Samantha Sostad, a Clover recruiter.
Clover officials sought help from the chamber late last year in finding workers to expand its local office, said Beth Taylor, the chamber’s vice president of economic development. The chamber helped connect the company with the Pikes Peak Workforce Center and Pikes Peak Community College as well as commercial real estate agents Steve Kohls of Cushman and Wakefield and Tom Lepry of JLL to negotiate the lease on the company’s office space, Taylor said.
The Colorado Springs office opened in 2015 after a former manager at Intelligent Software Solutions — a local defense contractor now owned by Parsons — recruited 10 former colleagues to join him at Clover, said Mark Kessinger, one of the initial employees of the office who is now an operations engineer and site manager.
“We love Colorado Springs and are pleased with the talent we’ve been able to hire,” Kessinger said. “We work primarily with third-party developers and high-value markets that use our devices and interface. The developers come up with specialized applications for businesses that we then make available in our app store.”
Clover was started in 2010 with venture capital from three former engineers for online voting startup Bix.com, which was later acquired by Yahoo! — John Beatty, now Clover’s CEO; Leonard Speiser; and Kelvin Zheng. The company, which sells a cloud-based point-of-sale processing system based on the Android operating system, was acquired in 2012 by First Data but operates independently.
Clover last year processed more than $65 billion in transactions for more than 1 million small- and mid-sized retailers, restaurants and service businesses — up 50 percent from 2017 — First Data said in a news release.
First Data conducted a test this year in Atlanta during which about 400 Girl Scouts used Clover terminals to process mobile, credit card and debit card transactions on cookie sales.
Contact Wayne Heilman 636-0234 Facebook www.facebook.com/wayne.heilman
“Most of our employees for the Colorado Springs office come from the surrounding area.” Samantha Sostad, recruiter
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