Amazon’s hiring spree continues in India amid expansion drive

Amazon has more vacancies in India than in any other country apart from its home territory of the US. 

There are 1,400 jobs up for grabs at the Indian offices of Amazon, according to the e-commerce giant’s website. The bulk of the openings (650) are in Bengaluru while Hyderabad has 450 opportunities and Chennai has 150.

Hiring is taking place across functions and divisions at Amazon India, which directly employs more than 50,000 people.

The Seattle-based e-commerce giant has a large research and development division that supports and reports directly to the headquarters. Amazon also has engineers in India for its data centre division's sales, marketing and technology operations apart from research & development for Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing business.

The local e-commerce business continues to have the highest headcount, with more than 30,000 employees serving across sales, marketing, engineering, logistics, warehouse operations and delivery. However, many of these employees are sourced from third-party staffing providers like Quess Corp and Teamlease.

Apart from e-commerce and cloud computing, Amazon has been rapidly expanding its video streaming  (Prime Video), voice assistant (Alexa), digital payments (Amazon Pay) and food retail (Prime Now) offerings in India.

“Amazon sees India as a strong talent location," said an Amazon spokesperson. "Amazon teams in India work on complex business challenges to innovate and create efficient solutions that enable various Amazon businesses — both in India as well as globally — including Amazon websites across the world and also support payments, transportation, and digital products and services like the Kindle family of tablets, e-readers and the store.”

The Times of India was the first to report on Amazon India's vacancies.

At nearly 15,000, Amazon US has more than 10 times the number of openings in India, with the Greater Seattle Region accounting for the majority at 9,000.

Amazon had recently selected Arlington, a suburb of capital Washington DC, and Long Island in New York to be its alternative headquarters after Seattle as the company tries to decongest and deleverage its base, which has more than 40,000 employees.

The UK and Germany have the third-most opportunities within Amazon with 928 and 828 vacancies respectively, according to the company's website. Canada and Japan had around 600 openings as on Monday morning. China has 473 open positions.