Amazon is on a hiring spree in Cape Town amid massive expansion

 ·23 Jul 2019

Online retail giant Amazon is expanding in South Africa, with over 100 jobs on offer for its Web Services (AWS) segment, as the group plans to launch a special Africa Region in the first half of 2020, rooted in the Mother City.

Amazon has had a presence in Cape Town since 2004 and most recently moved into a new eight-floor building in the city in late 2018, housing its local AWS staff.

A year ago, the group had jobs listed for just over 50 positions, which has since more than doubled to 118 posts.

The positions include software developers, support engineers and infrastructure managers. Amazon is also looking for UX designers, data scientists and security experts.

Many of the positions also call for multilingual professionals, speaking Dutch and German, and cover work on its different systems – including AWS, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and E2M.

All positions are located in Cape Town, but Amazon noted that it offers a comprehensive relocation package as part of its offer.

“We are busy expanding our team and have multiple positions available,” the group said.

A full list of Amazon positions in South Africa can be found here.


Amazon expansion in South Africa

In late 2018, Amazon announced that it will open an infrastructure region in South Africa, consisting of three availability zones, headquartered in Cape Town.

The new region is the latest in a series of AWS investments in South Africa.

In 2004, Amazon opened a development centre in Cape Town that focuses on building pioneering networking technologies, next generation software for customer support, and the technology behind Amazon EC2.

AWS has also built a number of local teams including account managers, customer services representatives, partner managers, solutions architects, and more to help customers of all sizes as they move to the cloud.

In 2015, AWS opened an office in Johannesburg, and in 2017 brought the Amazon Global Network to Africa through AWS Direct Connect.

In May of 2018, AWS continued its investment in South Africa, launching infrastructure points of presence in Cape Town and Johannesburg, bringing Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, AWS Shield, and AWS WAF to the continent and adding to the 138 points of presence AWS has around the world.

The addition of the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region will enable organisations to provide lower latency to end users across Sub-Saharan Africa and will enable more African organisations to leverage advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Internet of Things (IoT), mobile services, and more to drive innovation.

Local AWS customers will also be able to store their data in South Africa with the assurance that their content will not move without consent, while those looking to comply with the upcoming Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) will have access to secure infrastructure that meets the most rigorous international compliance standards.

AWS clients in South Africa include Absa, Investec, MedScheme, MiX Telematics, Old Mutual, Pick n Pay, Standard Bank, and Travelstart, among others.


Read: Standard Bank partners with Amazon to accelerate cloud migration

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