Seattletimes has an article about Amazon's job growth in the Seattle area.

Amazon.com on a hiring spree

Amazon.com has been expanding its office complex in South Lake Union and has about 1,900 openings in Seattle.

By Amy Martinez

Seattle Times business reporter

GREG GILBERT / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Amazon began moving into its new headquarters complex in South Lake Union last spring and now occupies seven buildings covering 845,000 square feet.

It's tough times all around, just not at Amazon's new headquarters in the South Lake Union area of Seattle.

Young workers dressed in jeans and T-shirts type away on laptops in small conference rooms named after products sold on Amazon's website. Vending machines serve up pricey gluten-free cookies and dry-roasted edamame. And for their pooches, doggy biscuits are handed out at the main reception desk.

Amid a sluggish job market and shaky economic recovery, the world's biggest Internet retailer is hiring like crazy at its headquarters complex. Consider Amazon's online jobs board: It lists about 1,900 openings in Seattle, at least twice as many as a year ago. More than 900 call for techies.

If Amazon is adding 900 technical jobs. How many are in AWS? I blogged about 166 job positions open in May 2010.

I was in Home Depot yesterday and saw one of my ex-Microsoft friends who joined Amazon Web Services 4 years ago when people weren't familiar with the term Cloud Computing. We had a quick catch-up in between Grill Aisle and Lawn Mowers. I told him how I blogged about AWS having 100 job openings. Curious I checked today and there were 147 US jobs and 19 Int'l jobs for AWS.

So, going up to Amazon career and searching for "AWS" there are 43 pages of 10 jobs a page. The 43rd page has 3 entries. 42 X 10 + 3 = 423.

Current job postings for Amazon of 1,900 for 33,700 employees equals a 5.6% hiring rate.

Worldwide, Amazon had 33,700 employees at the end of 2010, about 9,400 more than at the end of the previous year.

For a fast growing business if you assume a 20% hiring percentage, multiply 423 X 5 is about 2,000 employees. Take your own guess on the size of AWS higher or lower, AWS is on fire and hiring.

Don't forget versus all the rest of the cloud companies, Amazon has more customers and more data than anyone else. A huge investment in customer analytics systems. Analyzing behavior gives Amazon an advantage where their size makes it difficult for competitors.