Amazon’s managers like Spain’s engineers.
Amazon on Monday announced the opening of a new software development center in downtown Madrid, the second technology facility the retailer has launched in that city in less than a year, and the company’s managers said how much they respect the skills of the country’s engineers.
Spain has a “large pool of engineers” who have shown great “talent and creativity,” said Terry Hanold, Amazon’s international vice president of technology, in a statement. “And we are happy to create a technology team in Madrid that is able to develop new features for our customers in Spain, Europe and around the world.”
In addition to the talent, Spain’s engineers may also come a little cheaper. The country has been mired in a nasty recession for several years. In 2013, Spain’s unemployment rate topped 25 percent. In comparison, the unemployment rate in the United States is 5.5 percent.
Amazon said it plans to hire 50 engineers for the new software center, who “will play a key role in improving the shopping experience of customers of five European sites,” Amazon said in a statement. The group is the only one in Europe dedicated exclusively to developing new services and site features for Amazon’s European consumer online stores.
The software center will be located in the same building that houses the business-to-business development center Amazon opened in Madrid last May.
