The new Amazon R&D facility will be located in Cambridge and employ 400 people
Amazon has announced a significant investment to boost its research and development activities in the U.K. with the opening of a new Development Centre site in Cambridge.
The new facility will have capacity for more than 400 employees including machine learning scientists, knowledge engineers, data scientists, speech scientists and software engineers. The U.S.-based web giant is currently recruiting extensively in Cambridge as part of its expansion plans in the city.
“Amazon’s increased investment in developing cutting-edge technology in Cambridge is another vote of confidence in the UK as a world-leading center of invention and innovation,” Minister of State for Digital and Culture Matt Hancock said.
The company said that once the new site opens, the current Development Centre building in Cambridge will be used primarily for research and development for Prime Air, a delivery system from Amazon designed to get parcels to customers in 30 minutes or less using drones.
Teams working on products such as the Kindle, Echo and Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa, will move to the new Cambridge location once fully operational.
“We are constantly inventing on behalf of our customers, and our Development Centers in Cambridge, Edinburgh and London play a major role in Amazon’s global innovation story,” Amazon’s country manager Doug Gurr, said. “By the end of this year, we will have more than 1,500 innovation related roles in Britain, working on everything from machine learning and drone technology to streaming video technology and Amazon Web Services.”
Amazon announced that it has invested £6.4 billion ($8.27 billion) across the UK since 2010, and this year has pledged to create 5,000 new permanent roles across the country, bringing its full time workforce to 24,000. Amazon said the new job opportunities are for software developers, engineers and technicians.
