Amazon.com Inc. has hired more than 3,000 people for its Arlington second headquarters so far, the tech giant said Wednesday.
That means Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has reached at least 12% of the 25,000-employee minimum that it has pledged to hire by 2030. If it makes that goal, it earns a total of $550 million in cash incentives from Virginia. Amazon could receive an additional $200 million in state funds if the company hires a total of 37,850 people by 2035.
Amazon declined to provide an exact HQ2 jobs figure. Wednesday’s announcement is the first update — and reflects a doubling — of the company’s local hiring count since December, when it put the HQ2 employee total at 1,600. A company spokeswoman said Amazon, which had said earlier this year it would heavily ramp up hiring in 2021, is on track for its local jobs and investment goals.
The company said it is still currently hiring for another 2,500 positions at the second headquarters campus, including roles for software development engineers, technical sales representatives and program managers for Amazon Web Services, Amazon Care, Global Immigration, Alexa and IMDb TV. Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud computing and services arm, has also located its East Coast hub in Herndon.
It's unclear how many of HQ2's 3,000-plus positions are currently based in Greater Washington given the reliance on remote work through the pandemic — Amazon, like other large tech employers, recently pushed its return-to-work timeline from September to January, when it will shift to a hybrid workplace. We've reached out to Amazon and will update this story when we hear back.
This is all part of a larger Amazon hiring push CEO Andy Jassy announced Wednesday. He told Reuters that the company is planning to hire 55,000 corporate and technology employees around the world in the next few months, starting with its annual career day in September. The 55,000 hires would represent a 20% increase in Amazon's corporate and tech staff, which now numbers 275,000 globally, Reuters reported.
Locally, Arlington was expected to determine by Wednesday if the county owes Amazon an incentive payment for 2021 — as well as back payment from 2020, as the funds were postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic — for its HQ2 office leases. Neither Arlington Economic Development nor Amazon spokespeople has shared the status of that payment yet.
Per the incentive deal signed nearly three years ago, the county will provide Amazon a portion of its hotel room tax, called the transient occupancy tax, in exchange for the company meeting its yearly goals for its office square footage. That amount could total $22.7 million paid to Amazon over a 15-year period, county officials estimate.
Amazon’s agreement with Virginia requires the company to employ at least 3,544 full-time office workers at an average salary of $150,000 in Arlington by Dec. 31, in exchange for $43.2 million in state incentives for 2021.
In August, Amazon reported filling 27,000 full- and part-time jobs on its corporate, technology, logistics and operations teams, including but not limited to those at HQ2, in Virginia since 2010. And that doesn’t count the company’s report of its presence creating 96,000 indirect jobs in Virginia since 2010 — 75,000 of which were filled in Northern Virginia — in retail, construction, food services, health care and transportation industries.
