Job Openings at Amazon Web Services Reveal Its Future

Amazon.com does not talk much about what it does in operating the world’s largest publicly available computing cloud. But if you read between the lines you can get a sense of where it is going – global expansion, a new kind of Web browser, and spy work for the United States government.

In an article published Tuesday in The New York Times, I noted that Amazon Web Services currently lists 600 job openings. These are United States based, mostly in its Seattle headquarters. There are another 175 positions overseas, mostly in Japan and Singapore, both of which have several data centers. There were also a significant number in China and India.

The jobs are all listed, sometimes with reasonably thorough descriptions. There are lots of jobs you would expect, like software developers and financial analysts. Then there are some really intriguing opportunities.

When I checked the listings in July, there were a few openings for people needed to work on the computing side of the Silk Web browser, which comes loaded in Amazon Kindle Fire tablet. Now there are 27.

Silk has always seemed interesting because it is a browser that splits computational tasks between a local computer and the cloud. Based on this typical job description Amazon is getting ready for Silk to do a lot more than just have it load books onto Kindles. The ad asks: “Imagine the possibilities when a Web browser is powered by a vast, scalable server fleet, massive network connections, and limitless storage resources. Can you think of ways to use those assets to make the browsing experience faster or to introduce previously impossible features?”

Also last July, there were several job openings at Amazon Web Services for Kindle project managers, who would work with “black belt and operational” software teams to make the tablet work better with A.W.S. (which is, after all, where all of Amazon operates, too.) Those jobs were filled, and there are no listings.

Amazon Web Services works with 185 government agencies, primarily out of Virginia. This position for a technical sales executive to the intelligence community was particularly notable:

“You will have the exciting opportunity to help shape and deliver on a strategy to build mind share and broad use of Amazon’s utility computing web services (Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon RDS, etc). Your broad responsibilities will include developing and managing a growing book of business for U.S. Federal Government. You will drive business and technical relationships and close business at a rapid rate across D.O.D. and the Intelligence community by helping to define and identify key opportunities. You will establish deep business and technical relationships through your knowledge of the customer’s mission and the environment. You will have day-to-day interactions with these agencies.”

The job, which requires a business and technical background, requires a minimum of 10 years of selling or product management, five years in networking or cloud computing as it pertains to several of our intelligence services, and a Top Secret security clearance.

Our spooks, among the most computing-intensive people in the world, still have room for more, it seems.

There are also a number of jobs that involve convincing venture capitalists to have their start-ups on Amazon Web Services, which may signal concerns about Amazon’s coming competition with Google Compute Engine, their public cloud, as well as Microsoft’s Window’s Azure cloud. There are also several interesting jobs in getting A.W.S. on more mobile devices, and putting in new products to help manage all this computing more easily.

Then there is this work with Amazon’s product reviews team, to increase the quality of Amazon’s reviews. Does this means Amazon is trying to do something about all those bogus reviews for hire, which my colleague David Streitfeld wrote about last Sunday?