At least that's what the job descriptions say.

Since May, Yahoo has been hiring software engineers for its new Bellevue office that was first reported here on Aug. 16.

Several more stories came out in September when Yahoo signed preliminary papers leasing the 500- to 600-person office and its plans became fairly well known in the community. But now there's another blip of news as the lease has been finalized.

Yahoo's PR department has been coy about its plans, but its HR side has been more forthright.

To fill its digs in the One Twelfth @ Twelfth building, Yahoo has been looking since May for software engineers "to join the team building the framework for the next generation of Yahoo!'s internet platform,'' one job listing says.

Another listing, for a software development engineer in "Tech Yahoo," details a project that will be done in Bellevue. Here it is, with the original capitalizations:

"The Query and Storage platform team with DataOS is building World class products to support high performance next generation Database technologies to store and query Peta bytes of data and tables with trillions of rows. The project involves architecture, design, software development, quality assurance, performance and reliability evaluation of such systems."

As pat of the "storage system development team," these engineers will "design and implement high performance distributed storage platform" and "maintain and improve existing storage system technologies to meet the needs of exponential growth in data."

Yahoo could also use the location to diversify into outdoor display advertising, since the company can hang a sign on the building that will be visible from I-405 on the edge of downtown Bellevue.

The previous tenant, Nortel Networks, cut back after leasing the big space during telecom's heady dotcom days.