Amazon.com is expanding aggressively in Canada, with plans to open a new development center next month in Vancouver, B.C. We discovered the new office via a Facebook post from Amazon.com engineering director Mai-lan Tomsen Bukovec.
“I am opening a new dev center in Vancouver in March if you know any devs or managers who would be interested in AWS EC2,” she wrote. AWS EC2 is Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud, one of the many cloud services offered by the company.
Amazon appears to be serious about conquering Canada, setting up a jobs page with additional information for candidates that talks about the city’s beauty and cultural attributes. On that page, Amazon says that it “anticipates growing quickly” in Vancouver. The jobs page lists 10 positions, including those for a software development engineer for mobile applications and a software development engineer for premium delivery.
“The Amazon Vancouver team will initially focus on helping to develop tools and applications that enable all Amazon engineers to deliver the best, most scalable and efficient technologies,” the jobs page says.
A number of other tech companies have established branches in BC, including Microsoft and PopCap. In fact, Electronic Arts, the parent company of PopCap, now employs 1,300 people in BC split between studios in Burnaby and Vancouver’s Gastown district.
As we’ve noted in the past, Amazon.com is expanding fast in its hometown of Seattle, leasing new buildings and planning a huge re-development in the Denny Triangle neighborhood near its new headquarters that would include three 37-story towers. It is also on course to overtake Microsoft in terms of worldwide headcount, now employing 88,400 people worldwide.
We have an email into Tomsen Bukovec, and we’ll update this post as we learn more.
Previously on GeekWire: Geek of the Week: Amazon’s Mai-lan Tomsen Bukovec
