Amazon is currently offering 110 positions in South Africa, a significant increase from the 55 jobs it advertised in mid-January 2024 and the approximately 70 posts available in late April. The surge in recruitment activity comes after a period of job cuts across the tech industry, including widespread layoffs in Amazon’s e-commerce and streaming businesses in 2023 and early 2024.
These cutbacks followed a period of unusually high growth for tech companies during the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to increased online activity and the use of many of their products and services. However, economic stresses strained consumer spending, leading to downsizing.
Many of Amazon’s latest positions in South Africa are in its e-commerce marketplace business, which launched locally in May 2024. However, a substantial number of the jobs are with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has a local history dating back to the early 2000s.
A team led by Chris Pinkham in Cape Town was responsible for developing the service’s key Elastic Compute (EC2) component, which played a fundamental role in making AWS the world’s biggest cloud platform. Although Amazon is most recognized for its e-commerce business, AWS accounts for about three-quarters of its annual profit.
Continuing to improve the platform and maintain its market dominance requires Amazon to have top tech talent at its disposal. The job category with the highest number of positions is Operations, Information Technology, and Engineering, with a significant portion of these roles being cloud support engineers with various specializations.
Amazon also has a high demand for software developers, including positions focused on AWS Support and EC2 specifically. The latest non-technical positions include several program and product manager positions. For more information on the available positions, interested individuals can browse through the Amazon Jobs portal, which contains more details on the required experience and qualifications for each job.
