Presently, Amazon is comprised of over 100 business entities held across the world,
many of which are affiliates of its 12 e-commerce and media businesses. Some
subsidiaries — many of which are the product of acquisitions — focus on specific
categories, like Audible in audiobooks, Whole Foods in groceries, or Zappos in
shoes. Among these, Amazon has separate retail websites for the United States, the
United Kingdom and Ireland, France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, the
Netherlands, Australia, Brazil, Japan, China, India, and Mexico. Across these 100
worldwide business entities, Amazon collectively employs approximately 560,000
people — nearing the collective population of Wyoming. Despite recent job cuts,
which are rare for the company, Amazon claimed to have hired about 130,000 new
employees in 2017, excluding employees of Whole Foods. The company also plans
to ramp up hiring in the future, especially with imminent plans for HQ2. As of
February 2020, Amazon has over 13,200 current job openings. AWS is the biggest
area Amazon is scaling up: with more than 5700 job openings, AWS accounts for
over 43% of all the open listings (compared to 33% a year ago). Fulfillment &
Operations is the next-largest hiring area, representing nearly 13% of open positions
(down from 19% a year ago). Other notable hiring areas are the Alexa Team, with
more than 1130 jobs (9% of current open positions, 5% a year ago) and the Amazon
Devices team, which includes the recommendation algorithm team MAKO, which
accounts for over 5% of job listings (4.5% a year ago). While there are approximately
4,000 fewer job openings than there were a year ago, this could be attributed to a
growing pool of quality candidates and improved retention for the company.
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