Dive Brief:

• Amazon is creating more than 2,500 tech and corporate jobs in multiple cities in California, the company announced on Tuesday. Amazon will expand its tech hubs in San Diego and the Los Angeles area — including Irvine and Santa Monica — over the next few years. 
• The e-commerce retailer is hiring software development engineers, game designers, user experience designers, HR, finance, IT and other positions to support its retail, Amazon Games, Amazon Web Services and operations teams. In the coming years, it plans to hire more than 1,000 employees in Santa Monica and more than 800 employees in Irvine.
• The company has signed leases new for offices in Irvine, Santa Monica and San Diego. The Irvine office will open later this year, and the San Diego and Santa Monica offices will open in 2023.

Dive Insight:

Amazon is expanding its California tech hubs after opening more than 15 sites and adding over 17,000 jobs in the state last year, the company said.

“These 2,500 new jobs include roles building cloud infrastructure, improving the Alexa experience, and designing cutting edge video games. They’re a fantastic opportunity for Californians of all backgrounds to join Amazon and build a successful career,” Holly Sullivan, Amazon’s vice president of worldwide economic development, said in a statement.

Those seeking a technology role can use Amazon's newest recruiting program, Best Fit, which allows software engineers to apply once and be considered for thousands of jobs across hundreds of Amazon teams, according to the company. 

The move comes after the e-commerce giant revealed in its Q1 earnings that its fulfillment network hires during the quarter covered employee absences amid the omicron variant surge, but the company "quickly transitioned from being understaffed to being overstaffed, resulting in lower productivity," according to CFO Brian Olsavsky. The company had a peak of 1.7 million employees in Q1, but they "were able to work that down" to 1.6 million by the quarter's end, according to Olsavsky. 

However, Amazon has snatched up tech workers in other cities over the past few years. In 2018, Amazon announced plans to hire 2,000 tech workers in Boston's Seaport District, a move it made after hiring tech workers in Minneapolis that same year. Last year the company announced it would add over 3,000 tech and corporate employees over the next few years in an effort to expand its Boston tech hub and to assist with Amazon Pharmacy, Amazon Web services, Amazon Robotics, Alexa and other arms of the business.

In a similar move, the Lego Group recently announced that it wants to triple the size of its digital team. It opened a new digital office in Copenhagen for 400 workers, and is expanding its Billund, London and Shanghai digital offices over the next three years. As part of the expansion, the company is hiring engineers, product managers, UX/UI designers, technical program managers, digital security specialists and data scientists.