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Booming Amazon to fill 33,000 US jobs

Benjamin RomanoAAP
Amazon says it has 33,000 jobs to fill.
Camera IconAmazon says it has 33,000 jobs to fill.

Amid high unemployment nationwide, Amazon says it has more US job openings than at any time in its history and will try to fill many of them at a career day next week.

The Seattle commerce and technology company announced on Wednesday it had 33,000 open corporate and tech roles and would hire thousands of hourly workers in its warehouses and delivery systems.

Online retail has boomed during the coronavirus pandemic as many other sectors, including restaurants and hospitality, tourism and physical retail, have been battered.

E-commerce accounted for 16.1 per cent of all US retail spending in the second quarter, up from 11.8 per cent in the first quarter, according to US Census Bureau data released last month.

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Online shopping's share of total retail spending increased in the first half of 2020 as much as it did in the prior five years combined.

Amazon - with an estimated 38 per cent of the US e-commerce market, according to eMarketer - has capitalised, posting a second quarter profit of $US5.24 billion ($A7.20 billion), its most profitable quarter ever, even as it spent billions on operational changes in response to the pandemic.

Its cloud-computing arm, Amazon Web Services, has also continued to hold a dominant lead over rivals including Microsoft and Google.

Amazon ended the second quarter with 602,000 employees in the US, not including seasonal or temporary workers, or tens of thousands of others who work at contract delivery companies, air cargo operators and other businesses that make the giant company's logistics machine run.

The company's global workforce exceeds 875,000 people.

The 33,000 open corporate and tech roles are across the company's businesses and physical locations, including its Seattle headquarters - which had 6585 openings on Wednesday, far more than any other location - and 18 tech hubs in cities across the country.

Amazon said last week it is making space in Bellevue over the next five years to accommodate as many as 25,000 employees. In Seattle, it employs about 55,000 people directly.

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