Amazon, the largest Internet-based retailer in the U.S., is expanding in South Africa with an office in Johannesburg and plans to hire more than 250 highly skilled workers in the next year, according to reports in BusinessTech and eNCA.

There will be openings for new, highly skilled workers including software development engineers; network development engineers; support engineers; technical account managers; systems engineers; solutions architects and other technologists.

So how big is Amazon? It started as an online bookstore but soon diversified. Now it sells just about everything plus it’s the world’s largest provider of cloud computing services. The company’s total assets in the fourth quarter of 2014 were $54.505 billion, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Amazon Development Center in Cape Town was established in 2004 to help build the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) service. It develops technology for several Amazon businesses including Amazon Web Services.

The new Johannesburg office has been launched to support the growing customer base for Amazon Web Services.

Choosing to locate an Amazon Web Services office in South Africa speaks to the rapidly growing customer base, the broad set of talent there and the investment Amazon is making to support cloud adoption around the world, said Steve Midgley, head of Amazon Web Services for Europe, Middle East and Africa, in a prepared statement.

“By expanding our presence in South Africa, and through hiring highly skilled staff, we intend to further accelerate the growth of our cloud customers in Africa and around the globe,” Midgley said.

South African businesses were among the earliest adopters of Amazon Web Services when it launched in the country, eNCA reports.

“Customers based in South Africa are using Amazon Web Services to run everything from development and test environments to big data analytics, from mobile, web and social applications to enterprise business applications, public sector and mission critical workloads,” the company said, according to eNCA.

There will be job openings in both offices, BusinessTech reports.

African businesses that are customers of Amazon Web Services include Entersekt, PayGate and, Travelstart, Adcorp and Medscheme, according to BusinessTech.

Many of the new jobs in South Africa will involve working on Amazon EC2 as well as new services, pioneering networking technologies and next-generation cloud software.

According to eNCA, Amazon has had a South African presence for so long due in part to the fact that former EC2 developer Chris Pinkham returned to his home country, where he helped develop the product alongside Willem van Biljon.

The two subsequently left Amazon and founded software startup Nimbula, which was acquired by Oracle in 2013, eNCA reports.

Amazon’s Johannesburg office is part of its wider investment in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.