Amazon Resumes Hiring Spree in South Africa

E-commerce giant, Amazon, is centering its interest towards South Africa with new job listings in the country in various fields, including customer support, senior management, and more.

Since 2004, the Big Tech giant has marked its robust presence in the oldest and second-largest city in South Africa, Cape Town. Then, in late 2018, it changed location by moving into a new building comprised of eight floors in the same city for the better housing of its local Amazon Web Services (AWS) employees.

In parallel, Amazon has also expanded its influence in the South African city, Johannesburg. Both offices are listed to welcome applicants for a variety of new positions, mainly directed at the group’s cloud business, in addition to initiating a new staffing process for streaming and call center businesses.

This isn’t the first time Amazon has gone on a hiring spree in the region. In 2020, Amazon listed around 3,000 remote work jobs with job positions in Cape Town, including enterprise account manager, IT support technician, production executive (unscripted TV shows in South Africa), software development engineer, senior recruiter for Amazon Prime Video and Studios, senior solutions architect, senior workforce manager, software development engineer, and technical customer service associate.

As for the Johannesburg listings, the tech titan also opened positions to build teams in the capital of Gauteng province, including enterprise account manager, head of public policy, principal migration consultant, senior consultant (DevOps), senior practice manager for data and the platform, and senior solutions architect.

Not only is Amazon working on expanding its staff circle in the African continent, but this plan has been in motion for a while now. Earlier in 2004, the tech titan opened a development center in Cape Town, focusing on developing leading networking technologies, customer service next-generation software, and the leading technology for Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

In addition, Amazon also created a multitude of local teams incorporating account managers, customer services representatives, partner managers, solutions architects, and much more in its latest attempt to provide its customer-base move to the cloud.

Moreover, AWS also publicized the availability of its cloud contact center solution, Amazon Connect, offering services at a decreased cost compared to the conventional contact center in South Africa.

“Amazon Connect requires no infrastructure to deploy or manage. It is easy to use, and it scales up and down as contact volumes change,” Chris Erasmus, country manager at AWS, said in a statement.

“The services include embedded machine learning to save agents time and enable businesses to provide natural, efficient, and personalized experiences to customers with a few clicks, organizations can automate interactions, understand customer sentiment, and enable self-service operations,” he added.

Currently, AWS is being adopted by a South African bank and financial service group, the Standard Bank. AWS has presented itself as an exceedingly cost-effective service provider, compared to the traditional solutions providers, where businesses only pay for the interaction period between agents and customers.

“Amazon Connect contact centers can be set up and configured in minutes, and agents only need a headset and an internet connection to get started. With Amazon Connect, businesses improve their customers’ experiences and their contact center’s effectiveness,” Erasmus expressed.