Looking for a job? Amazon has 37,000+ openings

At one point last week, Amazon had about 37,200 job listings around the world.

That’s the most listings the Seattle company has posted on its Amazon.jobs career site in at least 15 months, a company spokesperson said — and may be the most ever, though a system update prevents easy comparisons to earlier periods.

Amazon is seeking everyone from hourly warehouse workers to top-paid machinelearning experts, underscoring the breadth and scope of the company’s operations and ambition. The listings provide a rough map of Amazon’s near-term growth priorities across businesses and geographies.

Amazon’s ongoing hiring follows a year when its global workforce grew by 150,500 people, or more than 23%. It finished 2019 with 798,000 full- and part-time employees, not including contractors.

In the United States, where the company has more than 500,000 employees, continued hiring comes against a national backdrop of strong demand for labor. Nationwide, open positions outnumber job seekers, but openings fell to a still-strong 6.4 million at the end of 2019, down nearly 15% from a year earlier and the second consecutive month of declines, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Amazon’s labor needs, particularly for in-demand technology professionals, can boggle the mind. The company had more than 10,600 jobs listings in software development, the largest single category, with an additional 7,400 listings in adjacent roles such as IT engineering and data science. (Job listings are added, updated and filled on a minute-by-minute basis. The job listings in this story reflect openings at 2:03 p.m. on Feb. 11, to be precise. By 2:42 p.m., the number of listings had increased by 54.)

Amazon was seeking to fill more than 4,500 project- or program-management roles. It had nearly 2,050 openings in sales, advertising and account management. There were nearly 1,800 listings in fulfillment and operations management. More than 1,600 jobs were listed in human resources, including for recruiters whose job would be recruiting more recruiters.

“I don’t think most people, even people who have worked at a large, behemoth corporation like I did at AT&T, can even fathom the idea of having that many open professional positions at one time,” said Brent Heslop, who now heads the business-transformation practice in the Seattle office of consulting firm Mercer.

Amazon’s main headquarters city, where it already has more than 50,000 employees, remains the location of the plurality of job listings, and by a large margin. There were nearly 11,500 openings listed in Seattle.

The No. 2 city was Bangalore, India, with 1,430 job listings at the time of the Feb. 11 snapshot. Vancouver, British Columbia, had 973 listings, followed by London (906). Arlington, Va., where Amazon is building its second headquarters, had 517 openings, while nearby Herndon, Va., had 898. New York City, the abandoned HQ2 locale, is still a growing Amazon hub. It had 864 job listings.

Bellevue, Wash., where Amazon intends to grow to 15,000 employees in the next few years, had more than 700 openings.