As a company, Amazon is experiencing quite a moment. The COVID-19 pandemic has driven people to order products online in unprecedented numbers; in addition, there’s increased demand for the cloud-based services provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). How is all of that translating into the jobs and skills that Amazon is hiring for?

For an answer to that question, we turned to Burning Glass, which collects and analyzes millions of job postings from across the country. When we turned that magnifying lens on Amazon’s hiring practices, we found something that should hearten technologists interested in working for the e-commerce giant. Simply put, Amazon is hiring for a variety of pretty common skills and programming languages, including Java, C++, Python, and Linux. 

Here’s the breakdown, based on an analysis of 60 days’ worth of Amazon job postings:

That Amazon would want many of its technologists to know AWS is a no-brainer. Requiring Java, C++ and Python know-how also makes sense, as a vast array of new and legacy platforms are built on top of those languages. The presence of machine learning is also notable; one of Amazon’s major initiatives is making Alexa, its voice-activated digital assistant, smarter.

As you might expect, based on that broad skills list, Amazon is hiring quite a number of developers and engineers for all aspects of its business, from software-building to network maintenance. Data scientists and analysts are also prominently featured on this list; no doubt Amazon needs lots of these technologists in order to wrangle and analyze immense datasets for crucial insight. 

In any of these breakdowns, it’s all too easy to focus on the technical roles and skills. As any technologist will tell you, however, “soft skills” such as communication and teamwork are crucial, especially for more senior roles that involve lots of interaction with other teams. Here are the soft skills that popped up frequently within Amazon’s job postings; if you want to land a job at the company, you clearly need to know how to effectively deal with others:

If you’re a new-to-industry software engineer who’s interested in working for a huge tech firm, it’s worth taking a moment to compare the entry-level engineer salaries at Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. In order to determine that, we can turn to levels.fyi, which crowdsources compensation data (including stock options and bonuses) from a range of companies. 

As you might expect for a multi-billion-dollar firm, Amazon’s salaries are competitive, although it pays somewhat less in stock than its competitors (on average):

Any engineer interested in an Amazon job should learn as much about AWS as possible, especially given how frequently it’s mentioned as a vital skill in job postings. There’s a clear pathway to obtaining AWS certifications, and it’s always worth analyzing how AWS compares to Microsoft’s Azure and other competitors on the market.