Amazon is hiring again in South Africa

Global tech giant Amazon has listed a number of new job openings in South Africa, in fields ranging from customer support to senior management positions.

Amazon has had a presence in Cape Town since 2004 and most recently moved into a new eight-floor building in the city in late 2018, housing its local AWS staff.

It also has an office in Johannesburg, with new posts available in both offices. While the open positions are primarily for the group’s cloud business, Amazon has also recently started hiring for its steaming and call centre businesses.

The business has previously gone on mass hiring sprees in South Africa – including 3,000 work-from-home jobs in 2020. Some of the open positions are detailed below.

Cape Town 

• Enterprise Account Manager
• IT Support Technician
• Production Executive (Unscripted TV shows in South Africa)
• Software Development Engineer
• Senior Recruiter (Amazon Prime Video & Studios)
• Senior Solutions Architect
• Senior Workforce Manager
• Software Development Engineer
• Technical Customer Service Associate

Johannesburg

• Enterprise Account Manager
• Head of Public Policy
• Principal Migration Consultant
• Senior Consultant (DevOps)
• Senior Practice Manage (Data & Platform)
• Senior Solutions Architect

In 2004, Amazon opened a development centre in Cape Town that focuses on building pioneering networking technologies, next generation software for customer support, and the technology behind Amazon EC2.

AWS has also built a number of local teams including account managers, customer services representatives, partner managers, solutions architects, and more to help customers of all sizes as they move to the cloud.

In 2015, AWS opened an office in Johannesburg, and in 2017 brought the Amazon Global Network to Africa through AWS Direct Connect. And in late 2018, Amazon said it would open an infrastructure region in South Africa, headquartered in Cape Town.

The group is also aiming to build a new Amazon Web Services (AWS) centre in Cape Town at the Riverclub, expanding its cloud footprint further into the African continent.

However, this move, part of a R4 billion mixed-use redevelopment project for The Riverclub in Observatory, has drawn heavy criticism from indigenous Khoi and San peoples, environmentalists, and other lobbyists who have asked the South African High Court to interdict the project, as they claim it will have a detrimental effect on the local environment.

You can find the full list of jobs available here.

Amazon Connect 

Amazon Web Services has also announced the general availability of its Amazon Connect service in South Africa, a cloud contact centre solution that offers services at a lower cost than traditional contact centre systems.

“Amazon Connect requires no infrastructure to deploy or manage. It is easy to use, and it scales up and down as contact volumes change.

“The service includes embedded machine learning to save agents time and enable businesses to provide natural, efficient, and personalized experiences to customers with a few clicks, organizations can automate interactions, understand customer sentiment, and enable self-service operations.”

The service is currently used by the Standard Bank Group, and is much more cost-effective than traditional solutions because companies only pay for the time agents interact with customers, said Chris Erasmus, country manager at AWS.

“The launch of Amazon Connect in the Cape Town Region helps enterprises provide consistent, responsive, and personalized support to their customers, no matter where their agents or customers are located.

“Amazon Connect contact centers can be set up and configured in minutes, and agents only need a headset and an internet connection to get started. With Amazon Connect, businesses improve their customers’ experiences and their contact center’s effectiveness.”

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