Amazon to create more than 1000 ‘Silicon Valley jobs’ in UK

E-commerce giant Amazon has unveiled plans to create over 1,000 jobs across three UK cities.

The company will added at least 600 roles in Manchester covering “highly skilled” areas such as software, machine learning and its cloud computing arm AWS.

At development centres in Cambridge and Edinburgh, Amazon will create 180 and 250 jobs respectively.

International Trade Secretary Dr Liam Fox MP called the news an “enormous vote of confidence in the UK”, with Amazon UK country manager Doug Gurr said the company is bringing “Silicon Valley jobs” to Britain.

The new Manchester site will occupy 90,000 sq ft in the Hanover Building, an office scheme in city’s Northern Quarter. Staff there will work on software development, machine learning and research and development, and other projects.

Teams at the Cambridge development centre are working on Amazon devices like Kindle and Echo, its upcoming drone delivery service Prime Air and virtual assistant Alexa.

Amazon’s Edinburgh facility is located at the Waverley Gate building. It was the firm’s first R&D centre outside North America.

By the end of this year, Amazon is forecast to have around 27,500 UK-based employees, including 6,500 in its corporate, AWS and R&D divisions and over 20,000 at its 17 warehouses and 40 delivery stations. Globally, Amazon has over 575,000 employees.