Amazon’s Drone Team Is Hiring: Look At These Nifty Job Ads

Amazon.com’s founder, Jeff Bezos, keeps saying that he wants to revolutionize package delivery by using drones. Skeptics snicker, but Bezos won’t back down. Does he realize how much controversy may lie ahead? It sure looks like it, based on a peek at Amazon’s latest job listings.

I’ve been covering Amazon since 1998, and I’ve learned that when the company is being coy about how it plans to bring a new initiative to life, the best place to look for insights is on the Careers tab of Amazon’s website. After all, outsiders can be kept in the dark, but job candidates need to know what skills are needed and how they might be used.

This time, as usual, the job listings don’t disappoint. There are some interesting details to glean from the engineering postings, such as the fact that the drone development team will be based in San Francisco (not in Amazon’s Seattle headquarters), or that Amazon right now is more concerned about building out its expertise in software, rather than hardware.

For the fullest glimpses of what project leaders Gur Kimchi and Daniel Buchmueller have in mind, though, turn to the non-technical listings. What caught my eye are notices for full-time communications manager and a full-time patent lawyer to help get this project off the ground. The jaunty tone of those listings underscore Bezos’s willingness to charge ahead, no matter what everyone else is saying.

Let’s start by dissecting the communications manager listing. The sunny news first: Amazon defines this as a “high-visibility position where you’ll work directly with Amazon senior executives. . . . You move very fast and think big. ” After all, Amazon wants a media chief who can “ drive massive awareness for Amazon Prime Air.”

Now for the tricky stuff. Amazon also wants candidates who are “comfortable dealing with ambiguity and able to form a cohesive and effective outcome from potentially incongruous facts.” Take a closer look at those last three words. You don’t see those in many job notices, do you? Amazon isn’t tipping its hand any further at this point, but it’s safe to assume that “incongruous facts” might include drones that crash, drop the shipment prematurely or otherwise malfunction.