NEW YORK (Reuters) - Google Inc is planning to expand its staff by a third, with most of the new hirings in Europe, the Financial Times reported on its Website.

The Web search company plans to hire several thousand engineers in Europe to create a research and development team in the region as big as in the United States, the report said.

"I aim to grow the EMEA engineering team as big as the one in North America. This is why I joined," the FT quoted Nelson Mattos, Google's new head of engineering in Europe, as saying.

The article comes after Google in July reported disappointing quarterly earnings due to the costs of a recent hiring spree. Google's workforce ballooned nearly 13 percent between March and the end of June, growing to 13,786 full-time employees from 12,238 staff at the end of March.

The planned expansion is likely to be within the next three years, the FT report said.

Google was not immediately available for comment.

(Reporting by Lewis Krauskopf, editing by Paul Bolding)
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