Amazon is seeing a surge in growth for its cloud services, and that's created hundreds of jobs. This week, Amazon has some 700 openings posted on Dice, primarily in Seattle. Many are in Amazon's cloud services divisions, including Web Services, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3). The skills most in demand are development, design, engineering and Java. Since Amazon has positioned itself as one of the leading cloud computing and storage companies, the hiring spree is no surprise. The company is busy building its Amazon Web Services, which will include on-demand computing capacity, storage, content delivery, querying of structured data and message queuing. The division is looking for more than 350 "founders." Skills needed: engineering with expertise in Java, C/C++ and HTTP. EC2 has postings for positions including software engineers with experience in C++, Java, or Ruby to build and operate software. Amazon looks for practical experience building large-scale distributed systems, skills with complex system software, customer-centric and "passion" for making its software achieve its goals in operational reality, the company says. Amazon's S3 storage division has posted positions for software engineers with strong knowledge of network storage protocols including iSCSI, NFS v3 or v4, CIFS, or SMB. Since security is key when building cloud services, candidates should have experience building secure software and a functional understanding of security techniques and algorithms. It's all another sign of the big move toward cloud computing. An estimated 65 percent of new enterprise IT spending will be cloud-based by 2015, according to Saugatuck Technology Inc. Within the next four years, one quarter of total enterprise IT workloads will be cloud-based or hybrid, and 15 percent or more of enterprise spending will be cloud-based or hybrid, the company says. -- Chandler Harris