Amazon has announced that it is expanding its workforce in Israel by 150 in development and related areas. Amazon has been operating in Israel since 2014 and currently has 1,150 employees in the country in the area of development. The online retail giant hopes to complete the recruiting by the end of 2020 and if all goes to plan it will have 1,300 development employees in Israel by the end of the year, Trend reports with reference to Globes.
The new jobs being created by Amazon in Israel are not in online retail - an area in which the company began operations in Israel on a limited scale recently. The new jobs will be in the expansion of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing unit in Israel as well as its activities based on Annapurna Labs, the Israeli semiconductor platform that Amazon acquired in 2016 for $350 million.
Other Amazon development operations in Israel are based on the 2019 $250 million acquisition of Israeli cloud services company CloudEndure and other companies including storage company E8, ad-serving company, Sizmek, Alexa Shopping, Lab 126, Prime Air. The new jobs being created are in Amazon's development centers in Tel Aviv, Herzliya and Haifa.
Amazon will be recruiting 150 employees at a time when many people have been put on unpaid leave or laid off because of the Covid-19 crisis but there remains fierce competition between the development centers of international tech companies and startups as well as Israeli tech companies and the defense industries for the highest quality staff.
Amazon has been expanding its leading-edge tech development presence in Israel in recent years. In 2018 it opened Floor 28 in the Azrieli Sarona tower in Tel Aviv to provide early stage startups and entrepreneurs with mentoring by AWS software experts. In 2019, AWS launched its firsty infrastructure in Israel with the CloudFront facility and this year Amazon also launched Outposts and AWS Direct Connect, which allows enterprises in Israel to operate AWS technologies in their computer centers.
In contrast to its expansion in the development field, Amazon has been reducing its online retail operations in Israel and many other countries worldwide over the past six months to focus on huge growing demand in the US during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In Israel Amazon is only running limited operations with an online Hebrew platform for third party vendors, who provide buyers themselves. At present Amazon does not have its own warehouse or logistics center in Israel or ability to provide buyers directly.