By Thandisizwe Mgudlwa
Amazon the American multinational electronic commerce company is developing and is also creating opportunities for many others.
And here at home, Amazon South Africa is growing fast, bringing some exciting career opportunities for both developers and skilled tech support staff. The Amazon offices in Cape Town are host to a development team that is focused on software development and technical support for Amazon, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and a support team for AWS users across the globe.
The innovative, low-cost and scalable AWS infrastructure is matched by equally innovative support. AWS customers have access to a unique, automated support tool called AWS Trusted Advisor that diagnoses problems and suggests solutions in the areas of security, fault tolerance and cost optimisation. AWS Trusted Advisor is backed by a global support team that is available 24/7 via phone, email or live online chat.
James Greenfield, Software Development Manager for Amazon in South Africa, said: “We’re looking for people who can understand the technical issues as well as have great rapport with our customers,” said
The support team not only helps companies take their infrastructure into the cloud and solve problems, they also help us understand how customers are using the services and give feedback to the development team – a critical part of the overall effort.”
Amazon in Cape Town is also hiring system administrators and developers at all levels to contribute to the ongoing development of Amazon offerings, such as Amazon EC2. There are currently positions open for a number of developers to join the team, as well as development managers, technical writers, product managers, security and operations engineers and systems administrators with Linux, Windows, networking and database skills.
“We’re looking for people who are smart, adaptable, curious, motivated and willing to learn,” Greenfield said. “We’ll provide training for the right people if necessary.”
In addition to the teams supporting Amazon including Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s Cape Town office also includes a customer service team which is currently seeking associates for temporary positions over the holiday season.