Amazon has been growing its presence in South Africa over the last few years and plans to build a large new office in River Club, Cape Town, to accommodate this growth.

Cape Town has close links with the technology giant since South African Chris Pinkham built a team to develop Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in the city in 2004.

The success of the Cape Town office gave the company the confidence to open a customer service operation in Cape Town in 2010.

Amazon then expanded its presence in South Africa by opening an AWS office in Johannesburg in 2015.

This was followed by the launch of Amazon CloudFront locations in Johannesburg and Cape Town in 2018. In 2020, Amazon launched an AWS region in Cape Town.

Many South African organisations are now using AWS for their cloud needs, including the Tshwane University of Technology, Sentech, and the Department of Social Development and Social Services Agency.

Industry speculation suggests that Amazon is now shopping around for warehouse space in South Africa.

The company could be looking to enter the local ecommerce sector, but this has not been confirmed.

Jobs in South Africa

Amazon’s growth in South Africa is excellent news for the local economy. It creates jobs, builds skills, and increases taxes.

Since Amazon announced in June 2020 that it is hiring 3,000 new customer service agents in South Africa, it has consistently advertised new positions.

However, the tech and retail giant is not only looking for customer support agents.

The company is currently advertising over 200 jobs in South Africa, which include:

• 55 in operations, IT, and support engineering.
• 52 in software engineering.
• 24 in customer support.
• 14 in solution architecture.
• 12 in human resources.
• 10 in project and programme management.
• 10 in sales, advertising, and account management.
• 6 in business development.

Most of these jobs are in Cape Town and Johannesburg, but there are also many positions where employees can work from home.

Applicants interested in work-from-home positions must have an existing and dedicated uncapped fibre line that supports 10Mbps upload speeds and 5Mbps download speeds.

People with ADSL, LTE, and Wi-Fi connections are not eligible for these roles.

Detailed proof of connectivity will be required. The Internet account must be in the applicant’s name at their home address, and it should confirm it is a fibre connection with a minimum 10Mbps speed.

Applicants must also be South African citizens, permanent residents, or hold the legal right to work in South Africa.

The table below provides an overview of some of the latest positions available from Amazon in South Africa. For the complete list of vacancies, visit this page.