(GeekWire Chart; data via Amazon earnings reports)

Amazon’s appetite for hiring employees is showing no signs of slowing down.

As part of its holiday quarter earnings report, the Seattle tech giant revealed it now has 798,000 workers across the globe. That’s up 23 percent from the year-ago quarter. It’s also higher than the 14 percent headcount growth rate from Q4 2017 to Q4 2018.

Amazon added 48,000 employees over the last three months alone.

On a conference call with reporters, Amazon chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky said the company is hiring both more office workers and people who help deliver packages.

Amazon continues to build out its delivery network, particularly given its ambitious 1-day delivery initiative launched this past April. It needs more people at its fulfillment centers and other delivery hubs as a result.

The company is also hiring rapidly for software engineering positions and sales/marketing roles for Amazon Web Services.

Amazon is the second-largest employer in the U.S., behind only Walmart.

An Amazon Fulfillment Center in Dupont, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

Olsavsky declined to say if specific geographies were seeing more workforce increase than others, but noted that there is “certainly a lot of growth in North America,” in part due the initial rollout of 1-day delivery across the continent.

Amazon has more than 35,000 job postings on its careers page. The company’s hometown of Seattle has by far the most open positions, with 11,000 jobs listed. Amazon surpassed 50,000 people in Seattle last year. It has nearly 20 tech hubs across the U.S.

The retail and cloud computing giant eventually plans to have 25,000 people at its second North American headquarters in Northern Virginia, also known as HQ2. It began hiring for HQ2 last year.

Like what you're reading? Subscribe to GeekWire's free newsletters to catch every headline

Job Listings on GeekWork

Find more jobs on GeekWork. Employers, post a job here.