Amazon is making more real estate moves east of Seattle, adding hundreds of Amazon Web Services roles in Redmond, Wash. The tech giant is also adding more space in Redmond for its satellite operation Project Kuiper.
The plans, announced Tuesday, come as Amazon has shown an increasing fondness for growing on the other side of Lake Washington, across from the company’s sprawling urban headquarters in Seattle. The majority of that growth has been centered on Bellevue, Wash., where Amazon is leasing and building enough new space to locate 25,000 employees.
Amazon said in a blog post that more than 800 new AWS jobs — including software developers, UX designers, and technical program managers — will be located at Redmond Town Center. The number is in addition to 600 jobs previously announced. They’ll be based in a new 137,000-square-foot location at 16331 NE 72nd Way, featuring mixed-use office space that will be completed next year.
The company is also investing in new lab space in Redmond for research and development related to Project Kuiper, the initiative that will create a constellation of low Earth orbit satellites to increase global access to broadband. Amazon said a new 22,000-square-foot facility will “provide additional space for our growing team and help accelerate research, development, and testing for the program,” but the company did not share an address.
Amazon previously announced its Project Kuiper plans for Redmond in December 2019.
“Amazon’s continued commitments in Redmond not only demonstrate the strength of the talent pool in our city, but also that we’ve created an amenity-rich, business-friendly environment in which companies large and small continue to grow and hire,” Redmond Mayor Angela Birney said in a statement in the Tuesday blog post.
The longtime suburban headquarters of Microsoft, Redmond is currently home to 400 Amazon employees, and the company says it has more than 200 open roles in the city.
Amazon adjusted its post-pandemic return-to-work guidance for corporate employees in early June, with plans to allow for a mix of remote and in-person work. Amazon said that its new baseline will be three days a week in the office and the option to work remotely up to two days a week.
Amazon employs more than 60,000 corporate and tech employees across the Puget Sound region. Disputes with the Seattle City Council over the company’s impact on the community, and efforts by the city to impose new taxes on big businesses, accelerated Amazon’s interest in growing away from its Seattle HQ footprint. In 2019, after a prior tax battle, the company announced plans to move its worldwide operations to Bellevue.
