Monster today confirmed rumors of a layoff, saying 160 jobs will be eliminated. But the company tempered the news with the announcement that 80 positions will be created at a new Technology Center of Excellence & Innovation.

The center is opening in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just miles from Monster’s main facility in Maynard.

“The company is now actively recruiting for approximately 80 new technical positions to be located in the Cambridge center, with potential capacity for adding a total of 170 new positions at this center,” reads a press release issued this afternoon.

There was no indication whether any of the 50 workers to be laid off in Maynard might be hired for the new Cambridge center. The other 110 layoffs will occur elsewhere globally, according to the announcement. All the layoffs are coming in Monster’s product and technology group.

Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi is quoted in the press release saying the company has made “substantial progress on the consolidation of our various operating platforms” over the last two years. That’s created a “need,” he says, “for different skills and expertise as we pursue our next generation of product and search technologies.”

The new Cambridge Technology Center of Excellence & Innovation is practically in the shadow of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the nation’s major research universities and a leader in, among other things, computer engineering and artificial intelligence. Monster’s newest center joins others in Maynard; Mountain View, California; Prague, Czech Republic; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and New Delhi, India.

“Cambridge is a logical location for us to grow, with its world-class talent and leading edge research and development infrastructure,” says Darko Dejanovic, executive vice president, global CIO and head of productfor Monster.