Amazon Web Services plans Australian hires

Amazon Web Services (AWS) wants to hire more Australians.

That's of interest for two reasons, the first of which are rumours that the web services giant wants to open a local data centre to comfort customers who worry about offshore storage. The second is that El Reg has heard grumblings from the Australian outposts of infrastructure vendors who say their staff are being approached and/or picked off by the web services giant to work in a local Amazonian outfit. None say so on the record or are willing to name departed staff, so it's hard to say if infrastructure experts are being poached to run a data centre.

And at first glance, the people AWS says it wants to hire don't look like techies.

The company is looking for a Regional Sales Manager for NSW, a Sales Development Representative and a Field Marketing Manager to target small businesses and startups. The company even wants an Executive Assistant to support the ANZ Head of Sales.

But we've found something that hints at an effort to hire the kind of folks you'd need to run a data centre.

The something is a job ad for a Singapore-based “Recruiter Sourcer” for AWS who “will work with the staffing team focusing in the areas of candidate talent search primarily in the APAC Region, including India and Australia.”

At this point you may say to yourself that perhaps these new hires are only going to be more sales people. That could be the case, but the spec for the Recruiter Sourcer job says they must be able to “understand hiring needs and position specifications” and to assess “technical fit” of candidates.

“Technical fit”, we reckon, doesn't apply when hiring sales people.

Do these jobs signal that AWS wants a local data centre? An argument against that presumption would point out that the company seems to have no trouble hiring sales people with its website alone, as the site is replete with techy jobs across the region. An argument for would say that a Recruiter Sourcer is only needed because extra work is required to to find the exotically-skilled people needed to run a public cloud.

Also in favour of a scenario that has the company hiring to staff a local data centre is the May 2011 the company email to local customers which asked if geographic location of its data centres was considered important. That query looked like a probe to assess attitudes to and possible demand for a local bit bunker.

What we do know is that these job ads signal an increased Australian presence. And the grumblings from infrastructure-land are getting louder.

Watch this space.

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