LONDON (Reuters) – Amazon.com is opening its first office in Manchester, northern England, and expanding two other centres to house 1,000 new R&D roles in what it said was a major new investment in British innovation.
The U.S online retail giant will create 600 new corporate and development jobs in Manchester, take on an additional 250 people at its development centre in Edinburgh, and add 180 roles in Cambridge, eastern England, it said on Thursday.
Amazon’s UK country manager Doug Gurr said Britain was taking a leading role in the company’s global innovation.
“These are Silicon Valley jobs in Britain, and further cement our long-term commitment to the UK,” he said.
The new engineers will work on technology including personalised shopping recommendations, machine learning, Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa, AWS (Amazon Web Services) and its drone delivery project Prime Air, it said.
Amazon, along with other U.S. tech giants Facebook, Google and Apple, have continued to invest in Britain despite any uncertainty caused by Brexit.
Since 2010, Amazon said it had invested more than 9.3 billion pounds ($12.15 billion) in Britain and was on course to employ 27,500 people – including more than 6,500 in its corporate, AWS and R&D divisions – by the end of the year.
(Reporting by Paul Sandle; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
