Amazon plans on hiring more than 55,000 technologists and corporate employees over the next several months, according to new CEO Andy Jassy.
In an interview with Reuters, Jassy positioned the e-commerce giant as a good place for technologists (and other workers) who are inventive: “Everybody at the company has the freedom—and really, the expectation—to critically look at how it can be better and then invent ways to make it better.”
If Amazon follows through and adds those 55,000 workers, it will increase the company’s technologist and corporate workforce by 20 percent. The sheer size of that employee base makes Amazon an aggressive competitor for tech talent against the likes of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. (Amazon also hired 500,000 people in 2020, mostly for its delivery and “fulfillment center” operations.)
Even before this announcement, Amazon had been on something of a hiring spree. In a May corporate blog posting, for example, it broke down its intentions to hire 1,900 employees for “HQ2,” its giant “second headquarters” in Arlington, VA, right across the river from Washington, DC. On Sept. 1, it announced additional job openings at the facility for “software development engineers, technical sales representatives, program managers, and solutions architects on teams across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon Care, Global Immigration, Alexa, IMDb TV, and more.”
The company has also been swallowing up office space in New York City and other metropolitan areas across the country. Given Amazon’s interests in everything from streaming video to cloud services (via AWS), this hiring surge makes sense. But which tech skills is it actually looking for? For an answer, we can turn to Burning Glass, which collects and analyzes job-posting data from across the country; the following chart shows how many times certain tech skills have popped up in Amazon job postings over the past 90 days:
If you want to land one of these new tech jobs at Amazon, in other words, it pays to know some of the world’s most popular programming languages, including Java, Python, and C++. Working knowledge of AWS and the principles of cloud computing and software development wouldn’t hurt, either. Although Amazon intends on hiring thousands of technologists, it wants people who have mastered key tools and languages—and have an inventive frame of mind.
