Amazon is advertising 168 jobs in South Africa, including work-from-home positions that can be done anywhere in the country.

Initially founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 as an online marketplace for books, Amazon has shown exceptional growth and is now the largest ecommerce player in the world.

It has also expanded into other areas, including cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence.

This growth has seen the company increase its workforce by 500,000 employees around the world last year alone.

South Africa is one of the countries where Amazon is expanding its presence. Last year Amazon Web Services (AWS) went live with the Cape Town region, which opened many new positions.

This followed an announcement by Amazon in June 2020 that it was hiring 3,000 new staff members in South Africa, ranging from customer service associates to technical experts.

Amazon customer service director in South Africa, Andrew Raichlin, said they were “thrilled with the talent in South Africa.”

This hiring spree will take the number of employees of Amazon in South Africa to 7,000, which makes it one of the largest tech employers in the country.

Another vote of confidence in South Africa is Amazon’s decision to base its new African headquarters in Cape Town.

The company is the anchor tenant in the new R4 billion River Club development, which received the go-ahead from the City of Cape Town earlier this year.

AWS has a long history in South Africa, starting in 2004 when Amazon Web Services (AWS) set up a development centre in Cape Town.

Working from their office in Constantia, South African Chris Pinkham and his team successfully developed the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

EC2 allows users to rent secure and resizable compute capacity in the cloud and forms a core part of AWS.

Amazon opened customer service operations in Cape Town in 2010 which now employs thousands of individuals.

In 2015, AWS opened an office in Johannesburg. Two years later the Amazon Global Network expanded to Africa, through AWS Direct Connect.

In 2018, AWS launched Amazon CloudFront locations in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Amazon’s expansion in South Africa continues and the company is now advertising many new vacancies in Cape Town and Johannesburg.

There are also a few work from home vacancies where successful candidates can work from anywhere in South Africa. Applicants must have a fibre broadband connection at home.

Most of the new Amazon jobs are technical, including operations and support engineering, software development, and technical product management.

The table below provides an overview of the latest positions advertised by Amazon in South Africa.