Amazon's 2,000-Job Seaport Expansion Is Official

After months of speculation and clues in Boston city planning materials, Amazon officially announced Tuesday it will bring 2,000 new jobs to the Seaport. 

The new positions for the Seattle-based company will be in machine learning, speech science, cloud computing and robotics engineering. Amazon’s Greater Boston teams largely focus on Alexa, Amazon Web Services and Audible.The Seaport expansion will take place at a 430K SF building WS Development plans for Seaport Square. Construction is scheduled to begin later this year and complete in 2021.

While Amazon has maintained the expansion is unrelated to its ongoing process to select an HQ2 winner from a shortlist of 20 regions, the company has committed to Greater Boston in a big way in recent years. Amazon opened its first corporate office in the region in 2013 in Cambridge. It has since expanded to Back Bay as well as to the Amazon Robotics development center in North Reading. The company also has a lease for 150K SF at 253 Summer St. in Fort Point, where it has committed to bring 900 jobs.

The company has grown to 3,500 employees in Massachusetts since 2011. 

It also has the option to expand by 2,000 more jobs at a neighboring WS Development property. The company received $5M in city tax breaks for the first wave of jobs and will get an equal financial break if it exercises its option for the second building. 

“Amazon is excited to create 2,000 more jobs in Greater Boston,” Amazon Vice President and Amazon Alexa Head Scientist Rohit Prasad said in a prepared statement. “In just a few years, we’ve grown from a handful of software developers and scientists to a team of more than 1,200, inventing new capabilities and products on behalf of millions of customers around the world.”