Apple Looking to Expand Cloud-Based iWork Experience?

TechCrunch reports on a new Apple job posting that appeared last week that seems to reveal plans for an expanded online "cloud" experience for the company's iWork productivity suite. While Apple has offered an iWork.com beta site for document collaboration since soon after the launch of iWork '09 in January, the job posting hints at a new ground-up project in the works.

The Productivity team (i.e. iWork) is seeking an energetic, highly motivated software engineer in building a scalable rich internet application. The person will be part of the core development team and engage in an area from design to development of the software system.

Apple's desired qualifications for the position include experience with JavaScript and browser technologies, computer graphics, scalable rich internet applications, and productivity application development.

Although the job posting provides no details on project specifics, the mention of the position's involvement in "design to development" stages suggests that Apple is looking to undertake a new project of grander scale rather than simply continuing to tweak and build on its existing iWork.com offerings.

From the outset, Apple noted that iWork.com was planned to be a fee-based service, although it remains free for users of iWork '09 while in a pre-release beta version.