Skip to main content

Amazon is in the Middle of a Kindle Hiring Spree

lab126-logo-w-tagline[1]Amazon might not have sold as many Kindles and Kindle Fires as they wanted this past holiday season, but that apparently is not enough to discourage their hardware efforts.

EETimes is reporting that Amazon has some 255 job listings posted to the Lab126 website. The available positions are spread out all over the world, though most are located in Lab126’s main offices in Cupertino, Calif. Those openings cover a wide variety of positions, including everything from secretaries to a wide variety of hardware and software engineers.

Amazon is looking to hire a camera test engineer in Shenzhen, and the job listings for Seattle include a software engineer andĀ  a couple logistics managers. There’s a single job listing for Singapore, and it’s a rather odd one. Amazon needs an engineer to work with display makers. The odd part about this listing is that nearly all screens come from China or Taiwan, so I would think that Amazon would base that position out of Shenzhen.The positions for Hyderabad are largely concentrated in software engineers and managers, and there is even one position in Meguro, Japan for a data center engineer.

In September Reuters reported that Amazon employed 937 people at Lab126, and as of a few minutes ago LinkedIn listed 1,022 employees. They’ve boosted the staff by not quite 10% in only 3 months.

Lab126, as you might know, is theĀ Amazon subsidiary which has been responsible for developing the Kindle hardware, software, and apps. Amazon launched Lab126 in 2004 as part of their first step into ebooks. This was before Amazon bought Mobipocket, and that should tell you how long ago it was.

I seem to recall that in the early years Amazon was hiring Lab126 staff just for the Cupertino offices, so this new worldwide operation is a marked changed. It’s different enough that EETimes is speculating that perhaps Amazon might be planning to spinoff Lab126.

Filling out the rest of the usual corporate functions, Amazon is seeking a handful of corporate attorneys, IT staff, technical writers to work on documentation for the Kindle SDK, business and financial analysts, industrial designers, a statistician and even a reliability scientist. They are even hiring several recruiters.

Maybe these guys really are forming their own company!

I think he could be correct, and it’s the corporate that convinced me. In any case, Amazon is usually too secretive to tell anyone what is going on, so the first sign of a spinoff could be SEC paperwork of some kind.

Of course, if anyone at Amazon wants to secretly pass some info, I will keep it a secret.

Similar Articles


Comments


fjtorres January 4, 2013 um 9:12 am

A spinoff might be one answer but another (simpler?) is that Lab126 is big enough to *need* all those positions as full-time personnel rather than as part-time Amazon corporate support.
Bezos has repeatedly stated that Amazon would be doing more gadgets (and who isn’t, anyway?) so growing LAB126 from a small Skunkworks to a full hardware design operation is hardly a shock. Especially since they’ve started designing their own proprietary components, like the LTE modem in the FireHD9.
Any idea if any of the new hires have CPU design experience?
If they’re designing proprietary modems, proprietary CPUs and chipsets can’t be far behind.


Amazon’s hiring, New video licensing agreement, death of eBooks (really?) and a update to the video…my bad January 7, 2013 um 8:45 pm

[…] in the middle of a hiring spree. Can you believe it? All the gloom and doom about the economy, and Amazon is hiring people (and this is even after laying off all the seasonal help after Christmas!) Read about it at the […]


Amazon Reveals New HR Policy: Hire in Even-Numbered Years, Fire in Odd-Numbered Years ⋆ The Digital Reader January 6, 2015 um 5:46 pm

[…] around this time last year that Amazon went on a hiring binge at its screen tech sub Liquavista, Lab126 in Calif, and Lab126's new office in Boston, and now it seems that Amazon is going through a […]


Write a Comment