Yandex Blog

As life is gradually coming back to normal, we are now announcing the project of our new Moscow home. 

Located south of the city center on the current site of the Korston hotel, the Yandex headquarters will become a new local landmark, with its unusual silhouette, titanium-plated facade, and a publicly accessible covered atrium connecting the building with its surroundings.

The area around the building, as well as the first two floors with cafes, pharmacies, beauty salons and other businesses, will be open to the public. Public spaces around the office will offer an opportunity to relax, eat, or exercise. Yandex will also re-develop an area near its headquarters, creating a green park that connects the Akademik Zelinsky Street with Akademik Zeldovich Street.

The new Yandex home will be technically advanced and at the same time comfortable to work in. From the start, the building will be designed to easily accommodate both regular office workers and those remote workers who only visit the office occasionally. Lots of compact meeting rooms around the office will be perfect for meetings with colleagues who work remotely. The new office will also feature cafes, canteens, coffee shops, a gym, a basketball court, squash courts, as well as a swimming pool and a spacious roof terrace.

In addition to being a home to company employees and a comfortable public space for local residents, the new Yandex headquarters will also become a large educational hub with presentation rooms, classrooms, a lecture hall and a computer technology museum. Yandex will use its facilities to organize public lectures, master classes and presentations.

The new headquarters will match the local architecture. It will be of approximately the same overall height as the current Korston hotel, while the wings closest to nearby residential buildings will be lower. Architects were particularly considerate of the neighborhood when they designed the new Yandex home. Gagarinsky District has a special meaning to Yandex. Many current and former employees grew up in this area and still live there. This is where some of Moscow's leading research institutes are based. And this is also the area where Yandex began. The company's first office was nearby, on Vavilova Street.

Yandex employees will be able to access the new office on foot, on bike, or using a free shuttle bus from the University metro station, the Leninsky Prospekt metro station, or the Ploshchad Gagarina station. The free shuttle bus will also be available to the public. The office will also feature multi-level underground parking facilities for those who prefer to use their own car, while a part of the parking space will be reserved for Yandex.Drive cars.

The new Yandex headquarters has been designed by the London-based bureau PLP Architecture, with the firm's president Lee Polisano acting as the chief architect of the project. Russian architectural bureaus APEX and RTDA have also been involved in this project. In addition, Arteza bureau, which helped to create Zaryadye Park and participated in the renovation of Luzhniki Stadium, will spearhead landscape design. MR Group will be the project's developer. 

Dismantling of the Korston hotel will begin before the end of this year, while construction of the new Yandex campus will start after the project documentation is approved and all the necessary permits are obtained.

We are setting up camp at yet another location. This time, in Berlin, Germany. This is our 16th office globally and our third office in Europe.

Unlike our Lucerne office, which steers our European sales, and much like our team in Zurich, who develop, among other things, a speech recognition technology, our people in Berlin will concentrate on research and development. By the end of this year, we’re expecting the airy office space in Karl-Liebknecht-Straße, with enough room for up to 130 people, to fill with 30-40 workstations, occupied by top-class software engineers and user interface designers. At this stage, they will work on the global version of our well-loved Yandex.Maps service, with other tasks and projects being added in the future. You can take a look at our current job openings in Berlin right now.

Berlin wasn’t hard to choose. It has everything an exponentially developing IT company can wish for – a thriving high-tech industry, an attractive business environment, an impressive academic scene and a lively startup community. With its central geographic location, the capital city of Germany has become a major European hub for the IT industry, hosting a number of key events and conferences. It is also well positioned for talent scouting all over Europe.

Berlin is a perfect place to meet new people, exchange ideas, share experiences, learn about new approaches to old problems and discover new talent. In addition to all of the above, it’s just nice to live and work in, and Moscow (as well as many other great European destinations) is only a short flight away.