AMAZON ADDS TO HUB SPACE
Fort Point office to employ 900 by spring
Amazon plans to open a new office next spring along the Fort Point Channel with 900 employees, increasing its total number of full-time jobs in the Bay State by about 30 percent, the online retail giant announced yesterday.
During a press conference at Amazon’s Kendall Square office, Mike Touloumtzis, who leads the company’s Boston and Cambridge operations, said Amazon signed a lease a few weeks ago for a 150,000-squarefoot space at 253 Summer St.
“We’re hiring a lot of people in the next 12 months,” said Touloumtzis, who doubles as principal software engineer. “We just needed more space.”
After looking at a variety of locations, he said, the company settled on a building conve ni e n t ly located a stone’s throw from South Station, in a district that has become synonymous with innovation. North Carolina-based opensource company Red Hat Inc. recently opened a 40,000-squarefoot office on A Street, and industrial conglomerate General Electric Co. is building out its new global headquarters on a site adjacent to Amazon’s. “It’s really emerging as a neighborhood where people who want to work for Amazon want to be,” Touloumtzis said. The new space will have a mix of teams similar to those at Amazon’s Kendall Square and Back Bay offices, including Amazon Web Services, Audible and Amazon’s voice-activated technology, Alexa.
The number of jobs at the Fort Point location will nearly equal the roughly 1,000 at the other two offices combined and represents about a 30 percent increase over the more than 3,000 full-time jobs Amazon now has statewide.
Mayor Martin J. Walsh said that many of those jobs will “create new pathways for students to stay in the city” and are proof that “industry leaders are looking to Boston to see where companies thrive.”
“There’s no question Massachusetts is the nation’s leader in innovation,” House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo said.
Billy Pitman, a spokesman for Gov. Charlie Baker, said in a statement: “The Baker-Polito Administration has been pleased to advance Massachusetts’ leading competitive innovation economy, vibrant educational institutions and highly skilled workforce to support residents and employers, and welcomes Amazon’s commitment to investing and growing in the Commonwealth.”
Amazon’s rise in the Boston area began in 2012 with just one employee — Touloumtzis — working from an office at the Cambridge Innovation Center. By the following year, the company had opened its Main Street location in Kendall Square, which now has about 700 employees, followed in February of this year with another 200 workers in a WeWork co-working space in the Back Bay.
Whether Amazon eventually will try to find a space large enough to fit all its Boston-area employees remains unclear, Touloumtzis said.