Facebook has said it plans to hire thousands of employees over the next year and add an engineering team to its office in New York.

"We will hire as many high quality engineers as we can here in New York," Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg told reporters at an event also attended by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg.

"We're going to grow as quickly as we can in New York," Sandberg said.

She said Facebook would also be adding engineers at its Palo Alto, California, headquarters and in Seattle in addition to New York.

An engineering team in New York would be the company's first outside of the West Coast.

Facebook, which has more than 800 million members and is expected to go public next year, currently employs some 3,000 people

Sandberg said Facebook had plans to dramatically expand its overall workforce.

"We will be adding thousands of employees in the next year," she said.

Facebook currently has around 100 employees in its New York offices. Most of them work in marketing and recruiting.

Sandberg declined to say how exactly many people Facebook planned to employ in New York. But she said the company will probably need more office space.