Nasdaq-listed Amazon plans to add more developers to its Cape Town stable, and has ideas in the pipeline that could lead to it sourcing more staff.
The Cape Town-based unit indicated in April that it aimed to add around 50 new staff members this year, effectively doubling the team, and about the same amount of employees in 2013.
James Greenfield, senior manager for Amazon Web Services (AWS), says the company is a bit behind in its targets, but is making progress.
AWS Developer Support provides technical assistance for customers around the world as they build applications on top of AWS services, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon CloudFront.
In 2014, Amazon aims to add another 50 to 75 staff members, focusing on the developer side of the business, says Greenfield. For 2015, he comments: "I'm throwing darts at this point."
Greenfield says the group has been adding a mix of software and technical management staff, but its focus has been on technical employees. He notes that Amazon will switch its focus to software development for the next 12 to 15 months.
The online retailer already has about 800 employees in its call centre unit and is setting up a dedicated developer support office in Cape Town.
Amazon, which launched in 1995, has more than 56 000 staff members around the globe. For the year to December, the company reported $48 billion in sales and net income of $631 million.
Globally, there is a shortage of software developers and more demand compared to other pools of skills, notes Greenfield. However, the company has not battled to find staff and can still tap into regions further north of Cape Town, he adds. "There is definitely enough talent out there."
Amazon will grow a lot of small teams in the next two to three years that could break out into their own sub-categories. "There is no shortage of things we want to do."
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