While it continues to work towards getting its drones off the ground in the U.S., Amazon is taking a jump across the pond to test out its Prime Air service.
The company recently posted a job listing for a Flight Operations Engineer in Cambridge, U.K. who will be charged with overseeing safety of any test flights that the company conducts. An ideal applicant has 5 or more years of aviation experience, with at least two years of experience handling flight safety.
What’s more, this posting, first spotted by TechCrunch, is hardly irregular for the Cambridge office. Amazon has been hiring people to work on Prime Air in Cambridge since May of this year, according to past job postings available on the company’s site. That’s important, since Amazon wants to be ready to launch its drones as soon as Federal Aviation Administration regulations allow it to do so.
Earlier this year, Amazon asked the FAA to allow it to test its drones outside of Seattle, and said that it would turn to another country if the agency wouldn’t allow it to do its tests stateside.
In addition to drone R&D, the Cambridge office is also supposed to be a home for speech technology. That’s based on a set of job listings for Evi Technologies, a Cambridge-based company that Amazon acquired two years ago. That work will most likely be applied to the company’s growing portfolio of speech-powered hardware like the Fire TV, Dash grocery scanner and Echo personal assistant.
