It’s been a wild ride for Amazon this year. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the company to radically adjust many of its ordering and shipping processes in order to meet an unexpected spike in consumer demand. At the same time, more companies are relying on AWS to run their websites, e-commerce portals, and even machine-learning tasks.

Given this rapidly evolving environment, it’s worth monitoring whether Amazon’s demand for tech jobs and skills is changing on a month-by-month basis. In early June, we used Broken Glass (which collects and analyzes millions of job postings from across the country) to analyze the skill-sets and roles that the company is hiring for. Now we’re back with an update, and things have slightly changed. 

Let’s start with jobs—the top 25 tech jobs that Amazon is hiring for, to be exact. It’s clear that, over the past 60 days, Amazon is still ravenous for software developers and engineers, particularly in its Seattle headquarters. It’s also exhibiting a strong need for network engineers/architects and program managers, as well as systems engineers. As with many other companies across the country (large and small), Amazon has no doubt had to adjust and retool its tech stack to deal with the demands pressed upon it by the pandemic; after all, if AWS goes down for even a few minutes, it would take an enormous number of websites and services down with it.

We gain a bit more insight into Amazon’s hiring needs when we look at the top 25 tech skills that it’s hiring for. As with the last time we crunched this data, Amazon is keenly interested in technologists who specialize in Java, AWS, Python, and C++ (the order has shifted around a bit, but the same ones are still present). As with many companies, Amazon uses these languages to support its backend operations (and keep AWS running). 

If you want to land a job at Amazon, you’ll clearly need to know your way around AWS. Fortunately, there’s a clear pathway to obtaining AWS certifications. A software developer or engineer could also score some serious points with an interviewer by bringing up CodeGuru and other tools that Amazon has launched to help improve coding via machine learning. Ultimately, though, it’s familiarity with tried-and-true programming languages and platforms that the company really wants (and it’s not alone—Google, Facebook, and other companies really want you to know Python and other mainstays). 

Whether or not you’re actually interested in working at Amazon, though, technology jobs are intersecting more and more with the cloud; as a result, it’s always worth knowing how AWS compares to Microsoft’s Azure and other competitors on the market.