Amazon India to hire for more than 2,000 roles

With Amazon's India unit finally pulling ahead of homegrown rival Flipkart, at least in terms of gross sales in the last fiscal, the ecommerce giant is now focussing on its human capital. The company is looking to hire over 2,000 people in tech and non-tech roles across its various divisions in the country, including Amazon.com, Amazon Web Services, Amazon.in and its Devices division, The Hindu Business Line reported.

"We have over 2,000 open job positions of which, 50 per cent are for tech and 50 per cent are for non-tech roles and this number is growing as we speak," Deepti Varma, HR Director, Amazon India told the daily.

Some of the open job positions are for Software Development Engineer, Program Manager-Business Quality, Vendor Operations Associate, Manager-Risk Investigations, Quality Assurance Technician-Amazon Appstore, Business Analyst, Associate Site Merchandiser and Senior Program Manager-Amazon Pay, among many others.

Bengaluru accounts for the majority of the open job positions with 587 vacancies, followed by Hyderabad with 374 open positions, as listed on the Amazon Jobs website yesterday evening.

While Amazon continues to ramp up its India headcount, pink slips are becoming increasingly common at its Seattle headquarters and other global locations. In fact, the buzz is that the etailer is hiring 20,000 fewer temporary workers in the US to meet the holiday season rush against last year. Ahead of the festive season in India, it had hired 50,000 temporary workers.

India is already Amazon's second largest workforce centre after its home country, although it currently accounts for less than 9% - or 50,000 employees - of its 600,000-strong global workforce base.

According to the daily, Amazon's focus is also on employee diversity in keeping with its global practice of being an equal opportunity-affirmative action employer. "At first we were focused on gender equality but now, we focus on the disabled, people from different regions, diverse backgrounds and ethnicity from around India because we need diversity in order to solve problems for a diverse customer base," Varma told the daily, adding that Amazon's global workforce demographics has 40 per cent female employees and 60 per cent male employees.

Amazon is also focusing on minorities and the LGBTQ communities as part of its 'Diversity & Inclusion agenda'. The company has stepped up this agenda with a slew of initiatives like 'I want to Code', 'Amazon Campus Mentoring Series', 'Pinnacle' and Amazon Women in Technology Conference, to be held in Bengaluru next week.

Earlier this month, Amazon was reportedly among the 50-odd US companies - collectively accounting for $2.3 trillion revenues - that signed a statement standing up for transgender, gender non-binary and intersex people following news reports that the Trump administration was considering defining gender only as male and female, based on biological traits at birth.

Edited by Sushmita Agarwal