Amazon and Microsoft hiring in South Africa

Despite widespread global retrenchments, Amazon and Microsoft are still hiring in South Africa. However, the number of jobs advertised by each has dropped significantly.

Amazon lists only 13 positions in the country — down from 175 jobs in November 2022 — and Microsoft is currently only advertising one role in South Africa.

The two companies are still hiring in South Africa despite several major technology companies announcing mass job cuts in late 2022.

While Microsoft hasn’t announced any significant retrenchments, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that the company is laying off more than 18,000 employees in a memo to staff in early January 2023.

The ecommerce giant’s job cuts kicked off in 2022, which it previously expected to affect about 10,000 people.

The job cuts are concentrated in Amazon’s corporate ranks, primarily in its retail and human resources divisions.

“Amazon has weathered uncertain and difficult economies in the past, and we will continue to do so,” Jassy said.

“These changes will help us pursue our long-term opportunities with a stronger cost structure.”

Amazon’s South African operations

Amazon has had a presence in the country since 2004, when South African Internet pioneer Chris Pinkham decided to move back to Cape Town.

Pinkham was working for Amazon at the time.

In 2003, Pinkham and his colleague Benjamin Black presented a paper internally which shared a vision for Amazon’s retail computing infrastructure.

The vision was to develop a standardised and automated platform which would partly rely on Amazon’s web services, which were already in the works.

Then-Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos wanted to retain Pinkham, leading to the discussion about the compute service.

Pinkham received the necessary approval to return to South Africa and employ engineers from the Cape Town community to work on the project.

With the help of lead developer Christopher Brown and the Cape Town team, Pinkham successfully developed the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, which now forms a core part of AWS.

Amazon EC2 officially launched in 2006.

The ecommerce giant expanded its presence in South Africa in 2015 when it opened an AWS office in Johannesburg.

The latest development regarding Amazon South Africa is the possibility of launching a local marketplace.

In August 2022, Prebo Digital CEO Timo Dinkelman shared further evidence of Amazon’s plans to launch the marketplace.

Amazon also listed several marketplace-related managerial positions in South Africa in 2022. However, these appear to have either been filled or removed from its jobs portal.

Microsoft in South Africa

Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft in 1975 when they spotted an opportunity to develop an implementation of BASIC for microcomputers.

It partnered with IBM in 1980 to ship IBM computers with Microsoft’s Disk Operating System (MS-DOS) — a modified version of 86-DOS that it ultimately acquired from Seattle Computer Products. Microsoft received a royalty for each sale.

Microsoft released an early version of Office in 1989 and Windows 3.0 in 1990.

Today the company has a wide range of top-selling products and services, including Windows, Office, Xbox, and its Azure cloud services platform.

Microsoft set up its first offices in South Africa in Bryanston, Johannesburg, in 1997, housing around 500 employees and giving them access to a gym, game rooms, and other amenities.

The tech and software giant is currently only advertising one position in South Africa — a CE Field Services Engineer job.

Jobs available at Amazon and Microsoft in South Africa and links to their descriptions are listed in the table below.

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