Amazon HQ2 Posts First Jobs

Amazon posted two job openings mentioning its HQ2 office in New York City.

Both positions — posted within the last few days — are for engineering jobs for Intelligent Cloud Control (ICC), which helps connect the company’s properties, including Kindle, Amazon Video and Alexa. There are plans to hire 50 people for the ICC team in New York this year, with the current listings looking for a front-end engineer and a software development manager.

“Our expansion in HQ2 will allow ICC to meet its ever-increasing staffing needs, and provide the engineering leadership necessary across all of the other Amazon teams we work with that will also establish a base in HQ2 in the future,” according to the job descriptions.

Last November, Amazon announced it had chosen New York City and Northern Virginia as the homes for its second and third headquarters. Each location is expected to have as many as 25,000 employees, hired over the course of 10 to 12 years.

However, though the job descriptions mentioned HQ2, Amazon told CNBC via email that these positions will be located in current New York City offices, not HQ2.

“These jobs are among the hundreds of roles that we are currently hiring for in our existing NYC offices,” the company said, clarifying the listings. “We haven’t posted roles in our Long Island City headquarters yet, but we’re excited to kick off our recruiting process later in 2019.”

In New York, the company explained, it plans to add 700 jobs in 2019 and close to 3,000 by 2020. It will ultimately reach 25,000 by 2028.

In the meantime, two Seattle politicians traveled to New York to warn the city about the troubles Amazon’s headquarters have brought to their city.

“I hope they can learn from Seattle’s experiences, and create a set of new expectations for corporate responsibility that can benefit the working poor who work for Amazon and other people priced out of housing in high-cost cities everywhere,” said Lisa Herbold, a member of the Seattle City Council, in an emailed statement.