Go Daddy opening a Seattle office and hiring executives from Microsoft, Google, Amazon and eBay

Go Daddy is expanding again with a permanent Seattle-area office in Kirkland or Bellevue, Washington set to open in June. Several new employees are already operating out of a temporary office near Carillon Point in Kirkland, as Go Daddy is recruiting technologists with great success.

CEO Blake Irving recently hired veteran executives from Microsoft, Google, Amazon and eBay, among others. “The reason to join Go Daddy is simple … you can make a difference at a company that is hell-bent on changing the world,” Irving said. “We have the opportunity to help small businesses in ways no one else in the space is doing right now. This is a chance to change lives in profound ways, to expand the world’s economy by empowering people to start, grow and successfully run their small businesses. I’ve yet to meet a great engineer or developer who doesn’t want to leave their mark on this world in a meaningful way.”

Irving recently hired Chief Architect Arnold Blinn, a tech heavyweight, who spent 17 years at Microsoft Corporation in senior architect roles. “Go Daddy’s mission is to help small business owners and entrepreneurs succeed by helping them leverage the power of the Internet, whether for back-end business solutions, online marketing, SEO or website building,” Blinn said. “We have some fun technical challenges en route to solving our ‘customer needs’ at scale. I jumped at the chance to be a part of what’s going on at Go Daddy right now and I believe other Seattle developers and engineers will be attracted to this opportunity too.”

Go Daddy is the world’s largest domain name registrar. The privately-held company is backed by KKR, Silver Lake Partners and Technology Crossover Ventures and is rapidly expanding both domestically and internationally.

Go Daddy has hired a range of top-tier talent, with a diverse skill set, to work out of its offices in Kirkland/Bellevue, Sunnyvale, Calif., Denver, Colo., Hiawatha, Iowa and its corporate headquarters in Scottsdale, Ariz.

The new recruits who have joined Go Daddy include:

• Chief Architect Arnold Blinn, 17-year Microsoft veteran, 25 patents issued and another 25 pending in electronic commerce, digital rights management, photo manipulation and other online services. Blinn is the founder and architect of eShop, one of the Web’s first and most successful early eCommerce businesses, which was purchased by Microsoft in 1996. Since then he has served as Partner Architect and incubation leader for some of Microsoft’s most innovative products, including Xbox Live, Windows Live and MSN.

• CTO & EVP Platforms Elissa Murphy was Yahoo! VP of engineering for cloud services and helped lead Yahoo to be a force with code contributions for the latest version of Hadoop. She also spent 13 years at Microsoft and began her technology career in computer security with 5th Gen Systems and the Norton Group, a division at Symantec responsible for Norton Antivirus and other Norton products. Murphy brings expertise in global-scale platforms, big data and predictive analytics. She was recognized as one of the Top Women in Seattle Tech by TechFlash and currently has 14 patents issued, with another 19 patents pending.

• SVP and GM Hosting Jeff King is a 17-year veteran in online commerce. Most recently an executive at eBay, Jeff served in a number of roles over a 10-year span, including Head of Platform Strategy for X.commerce and Senior Director of Product management for the Search, and Trust and Safety teams.

• EVP eCommerce Phil Bienert joins from AT&T, where he led the online marketplace as SVP Consumer Digital Experience. He provides broad leadership and end-to-end customer expertise in product marketing, sales, service, design, strategy, social media, technology and operations. Bienert also led Customer Experience at CitiGroup after spending his early career at Volvo and Ford Motor Company driving brand and consumer product strategies.

• SVP Design and User Experience Rick Eames, worked for Microsoft most recently and Apple previously. He will focus on revamping Go Daddy’s design architecture.

• VP and GM Domains Mike McLaughlin joined from eBay where he helped build eBay Motors into the world’s largest online automotive marketplace. Most recently McLaughlin was COO at Glyde, a leading marketplace for buying and selling consumer electronics.

• Distinguished Engineer Scott Isaacs was a Microsoft developer best known for the development of Dynamic HTML, which is at the core of what is commonly termed Ajax.

• VP and GM Site Builder Products Raj Mukherjee previously led the Google SMB application business, after a successful career at Microsoft. He is overhauling Go Daddy’s website design and eCommerce offerings.

• Head of Commerce Sandeep Grover is a former Amazon Product Lead and now oversees Go Daddy’s eCommerce offerings, including Quick Shopping Cart.

Irving, who took over as Go Daddy CEO in January and marked his 100th day on the job yesterday, is the former Chief Product Officer at Yahoo! and a long-time Microsoft executive. He is evolving Go Daddy’s products and services while making them available to a wider global audience. In February, Go Daddy opened its Silicon Valley office and acquired M.dot, a mobile app that allows users to easily create a website from a smartphone.