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Amazon is opening a new development centre in Cambridge this autumn and recruiting "extensively" for highly-skilled people in the area to work on programmes including its drones business Prime Air, Amazon devices and the Alexa personal assistant technology.
The new 60,000 sq ft Amazon development centre building will be located at One The Square in the CB1 business district and have capacity for over 400 people. Staff will include machine learning scientists, knowledge engineers, data scientists, mathematical modellers, speech scientists and software engineers.
The new site expands Amazon's presence in the area, with a development centre already in existence at Castle Hill. When the new site opens in the autumn, the focus of this Castle Hill site will shift to its drones business, Prime Air, an aerial delivery system that aims to get parcels to customers in 30 minutes or less.
Those working on products including Kindle, Fire tablet, Fire TV Stick, Echo, Echo Dot and the new Echo Look and Alexa at the existing site will meanwhile move to the new site.
Doug Gurr, UK country manager at Amazon, said it will have created more than 1,500 "innovation related roles" in the UK by the end of the year. The expansion of the development centre in Cambridge is part of Amazon’s "significant investment" in the UK, having invested £6.4 bn across the UK since 2010, according to Amazon. This year it has pledged to create 5,000 new permanent roles across the UK to bring its full time workforce to 24,000.
Last week, Amazon also revealed plans to create 1,200 new permanent jobs with the opening of a new fulfilment centre in Warrington.