Amazon sees Silicon Valley's excitement in India, to hire more than 1200 professionals

After hiring a large number of people in US, Amazon is now looking to hire over 12,00 professionals in India.

The hiring will serve majorly to research and development (R&D) for the company's divisions, including Amazon.com, Amazon.in, the devices business, and the cloud-computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“ We're looking at a fully functional tech organisation in India and are hiring varied skills across several job families. India is a big focus area for talent,“ Dale Vaz, director of software development at Amazon India, was quoted as saying to TOI.

Amazon in India focuses more on mobile and its app market. “We are always looking for Android app developers who can solve India-specific problems like the fragmentation of the Android universe with smaller capacity handsets and the poor connectivity and speed in India,“ Vaz added.

Amazon's website lists 1,232 open positions in India on its careers page as till the publication of this report today. Among the open positions, 540 are in Bengaluru, 400 in Hyderabad and 149 in Chennai.

Out of which 199 positions for software professionals 153 for R&D, and 50 for data scientist among many are still vacant. It is looking for talent in technology spheres like research scientists, data analytics, natural language processing, artificial intelligence machine learning and Android developers. AWS is looking to hire 195 people in India.

At present, the firm has about 50,000 people on its rolls in India. India is the second largest workforce centre for Amazon after the US. Globally, it has around 3.41 lakh employees.

The Bengaluru centre is the largest for Amazon in India. The Chennai centre focuses on devices like Kindle and Fire.  The recruitment number for Bengaluru alone is higher than for any other centre outside of the US, including London, Luxembourg (where the global CTO of consumer business sits), Dublin, Berlin and Tokyo.

"The talent and excitement he saw in India was similar to that in Silicon Valley 20-30 years ago", said Terry Hanold, vice-president of international consumer technology in Amazon.

Earlier, Amazon held a massive hiring event in first week of August, to fill 50,000 positions,
in an event called Amazon Jobs Day. Amazon pledged earlier this year to hire 130,000 people by the middle of 2018.

US-based e-tailer, which has committed an investment of $5 billion in the Indian market, now owns 41 warehouses across 13 states.