Amazon’s long-awaited arrival in Australia will create “hundreds” of new jobs, the company said today.
The ecommerce giant has already begun recruiting for a range of roles including operations managers, pickers, packers, systems technicians, and HR specialists.
Those jobs will be based at the company’s first fulfilment centre in Australia, a 24,000 square metre warehouse located at Dandenong South near Melbourne.
“We are thrilled to be creating hundreds of new roles in Dandenong South,” said Robert Bruce, Amazon’s director of operations for Australia.
“This is just the start. Over time, we will bring thousands of new jobs to Australia and millions of dollars of investment as well as opening up the opportunity for thousands of Australian businesses to sell at home and abroad through Amazon Marketplace.”
The new centre is located in the Pellicano's M2 Industry Park in Dandenong South, providing easy access to the South Gippsland Highway, Monash Highway and Eastlink.
“This new fulfilment centre will stock hundreds of thousands of products which will be available for delivery to customers across Australia when we launch our retail offering,” Bruce added in a statement.
It is likely an army of robots will be working alongside the new recruits to fulfil orders at the centre.
The company has been rapidly increasing the number of bots in its warehouses – according to a Seattle Times report earlier this year – and now has 45,000 robots at work across 20 fulfilment centres (an increase of 50 per cent on the previous year).
The company has hosted an annual international robotics competition since 2015, in which bots are challenged to pick and sort unseen items into boxes. Last week, engineers from the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision based at Queensland University of Technology won the competition with their Cartesian robot ‘Cartman’.
Amazon has had a presence in Australia since 2012, when it launched its cloud computing arm Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the region.
AWS is far and away the world’s largest cloud computing accounting for 34 per cent of the global market.
As well as the pickers and packers sought for the fulfilment centre, the AWS arm of the company is also on a recruitment drive. Roles including cloud architect, SAP infrastructure consultant, escalation engineer and database specialist are currently being advertised.
The company currently has close to 1000 employees in Australia.