Amazon.com Inc.’s operations in Irvine appear to be taking shape as the company’s hub for marketing its growing offerings of cloud services in Southern California.
The world’s largest online retailer, with $61 billion in sales last year, is looking for new hires here to beef up Amazon Web Services. The unit is the linchpin in its effort to boost sales of proprietary cloud storage services to big corporate customers.
The AWS unit, established in 2006, offers more than 30 different services targeting customers that currently count on data centers for storage. So far the effort is under way in the U.S., Brazil, Japan, Singapore, Australia and various markets in Europe.
Amazon’s current client list spans 190 countries and ranges from big corporations to startups, along with government agencies.
Irvine appears to be among a small group of offices in the U.S. and overseas that Amazon has designated as sales centers for AWS. The company lists more than 600 open positions in the unit on its website.
A number of the positions are listed as available in Irvine. The rest are spread over its corporate headquarters in Seattle, the Amazon Web Services center in Herndon, Va., and offices in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, and Sydney, among others.
The Irvine office appears to be the only location in Southern California looking to add staff for the Web-services unit.
Spending
Amazon reported $3.8 billion in capital spending in 2012, and it singled out AWS as a significant investment in its recently filed annual report. Spending grew 111% from 2011, driven by property purchases and technology infrastructure, “including AWS.”
Amazon did not respond to requests for comment on its plans in Orange County, where it has kept a low profile since it set up offices at 40 Pacifica in the Irvine Spectrum nearly two years ago.
The Business Journal reported last April that Amazon’s a2z Development Center Inc. renewed a lease for its headquarters at 40 Pacifica, adding 80,000 square feet at the 15-story building, according to Washington, D.C.-based market tracker CoStar Group Inc.
The expansion was one of the larger office leases for a higher-end OC building in the past two years.
A2z Development now occupies about a third of the building, or some 110,000 square feet. The unit—which is led locally by Ameesh Paleja, its director and general manager—also has an office in Lake Forest.
The unit was instrumental in rolling out the Amazon Appstore for Android in 2011, and more recently launched a mobile-gaming division to compete in the crowded and fragmented segment.
Hiring Push
The AWS expansion is part of a larger hiring push in OC, where it already employs more than 200 workers. Many of the OC employees work on software for the Kindle Fire tablet—including an app for mobile payments and a test-drive feature that provided access to prime subscriptions for a month.
The company’s website lists openings for nearly 50 additional positions here, including numerous software development jobs, gaming and app programmers, and sales positions.
Amazon also is making hires here for what it bills as “top secret strategic initiatives.” It’s seeking a few “secret agent” developers to work on projects “the rest of our organization doesn’t even know about.”
