Amazon adding 125 jobs on Pittsburgh's South Side, doubling its workforce

E-commerce giant Amazon confirmed it is expanding its operations at Pittsburgh's SouthSide Works, where it plans to add 125 jobs in fields that include machine translation and speech science.

This expansion in the development on the city's South Side, across the Monongahela River from the University of Pittsburgh in Oakland, will more than double the company's current tech workforce in Pittsburgh, the company said.

The Seattle-based company said it has secured an additional 22,000 square feet to expand its existing office in the SouthSide Works building. The Post-Gazette reported the possible expansion of its existing 15,200-square-foot space earlier this month.

Amazon opened the corporate office in January 2017 with about 50 employees working on projects that include Amazon web services, machine translation and Alexa, the company's voice-controlled intelligent assistant.

Pittsburgh is a finalist for HQ2, a project that Amazon has said could bring up to 50,000 jobs and $5 billion in investment over 17 years. Other finalists include Philadelphia; Columbus, Ohio; Newark, N.J.; Boston; and at least three locations in the Washington, D.C., area.

The company stated the expansion at SouthSide Works is unrelated to its search for a second headquarters and that it is part of its ongoing job creation efforts and planned growth in Pittsburgh.

"Since day one at Amazon in Pittsburgh, we've been focused on expanding our pool of local technical talent as well as investing in the community. From machine translation engineers to Alexa speech scientists, our Pittsburgh employees love inventing every day on the behalf of customers," said Bill Kaper, general manager of Amazon's Pittsburgh office.

sritenbaugh@post-gazette.com or 412-263-4910.