Amazon on a hiring spree in South Africa — how to apply

Amazon currently offers 110 positions in South Africa, a big jump from the 55 jobs it advertised in mid-January 2024 and the roughly 70 posts available in late April.

The increase in recruitment activity comes after a period of job cuts across the tech industry — including sweeping layoffs in Amazon’s e-commerce and streaming businesses in 2023 and early 2024.

The downsizing occurred after abnormally high growth for tech companies during the Covid-19 pandemic, which increased online activity and use of many of their products and services. This was followed by economic stresses that strained consumer spending.

Many of Amazon’s latest positions in South Africa are in its e-commerce marketplace business, which launched locally in May 2024.

However, dozens of the jobs remain 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 would play a fundamental role in making AWS the world’s biggest cloud platform.

While Amazon is most well-known for its e-commerce business, AWS accounts for about three-quarters of its annual profit.

One part of continuing to improve this platform and maintaining its market dominance is ensuring that Amazon has top tech talent at its disposal.

The job category with the highest number of positions is Operations, Information Technology, and Engineering. A large chunk of these jobs are as cloud support engineers with various specialisations.

Amazon also has a big demand for software developers, including positions focused on AWS Support and EC2 specifically.

Its latest non-technical positions include several programme and product manager positions.

Other categories with multiple jobs available include:

• Buying, planning, and in stock management
• Marketing
• Customer service
• Business and merchant development
• Sales, advertising, and account management

The table below summarises the available positions in categories with five or more vacancies at Amazon in South Africa in July 2024.

Those interested in other available positions can browse through the Amazon Jobs portal, which contains more details on the required experience and qualifications for each job.