Amazon India hiring over 1,000 people in a push to R&D and AI

Amid job cuts in the IT industry there is still a glimmer of hope for software professionals. Amazon India is looking to recruit over 1,000 people, most of the offers being for software engineers.

The hires will look after the cloud computing division, automation, research and development (R&D) for the company's various arms—Amazon.com, Amazon.in, the devices business like Kindle and Amazon Web Services (AWS), as per a report by The Times of India.

Moneycontrol had earlier reported that Amazon was going to create 5,000 new jobs in India in the current year.

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The jobs are open for Amazon’s Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Hyderabad, and Chennai offices. As on Friday morning, the company’s job portal listed 1,215 open positions in India. The e-commerce giant has around 50,000 employees in the country and close to 3.5 lakh worldwide. Amazon’s strength of employees in India is second only to the US where it is headquartered.

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"The numbers are mind boggling. We're looking at a fully functional tech organisation in India and are hiring varied skills across several job families. India is a big focus area for talent," the report quoted Dale Vaz, director of software development at Amazon India.

The company said that the number of people it is hiring is limited only by the talent pool in the sectors it requires. The kind of talent the company is after are research scientists, data analytics, natural language processing, artificial intelligence machine learning and Android developers. The list is not exhaustive as the company said it is going to hire as many employees as possible.

"We are always looking for Android app developers who can solve India-specific problems like the fragmentation of the Android universe with smaller capacity handsets and the poor connectivity and speed in India. We've seen the India team reinventing the Amazon app experience," Vaz added.

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Around half the positions—550— are located in Bengaluru. The IT capital of India is followed by Hyderabad with 385 vacancies and Chennai with 144 open positions. The number of vacancies at Bengaluru is not just highest in India but also higher than for any other centre of the company outside of the US.