All those empty desks at Amazon’s new Boston office won’t stay vacant for long.
The retail giant says about 350 Amazonians moved into its brick-and-beam Fort Point digs after the place opened last month, although we saw plenty of empty workstations during a media tour Tuesday. Amazon has room for 900 workers there, and it’s currently hiring to add to its 1,200-person local tech workforce.
That’s just the start. Amazon plans to eventually pack 2,000 people into a new office that will be built a few blocks from the Fort Point spot, and it might lease a second building nearby to accommodate another 2,000.
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Amazon site lead Mike Touloumtzis doesn’t seem fazed. People, he said, want to come to Amazon -- and to Boston. The trick is figuring out where they should go: Alexa and Audible folks are generally ensconced in Kendall Square, for example, while Amazon Web Services has set up shop in Fort Point.
This hiring frenzy isn’t that unusual for a growing company with 550,000-plus employees. Amazon is recruiting at a relatively fast clip in 12 tech hubs in the US. Boston is just one of them.
Touloumtzis politely deflected questions about HQ2 -- the big office Amazon wants as a twin to its Seattle base. Possible locations have caused much speculation among employees, with some betting on particular cities in office pools. (The smart money is on the D.C. metro area, although Boston remains in the running.)
Amazon has come a long way from when Touloumtzis and some colleagues set up shop in Cambridge more than six years ago. It was all hush-hush then.
The company is more public about its local operations now. After all, it has hundreds of seats to fill.
Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jonchesto.
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