SANTA CRUZ – Jim Mackraz commutes from Palo Alto to Santa Cruz on Highway 17. Randal Hisatomi commutes from Seattle to Santa Cruz by way of San Jose airport. They both work for Amazon.com.

Wednesday night, they told 425 people at the Santa Cruz New Tech Meetup at Hotel Paradox that Amazon is looking for talent in Santa Cruz.

Nine other tech companies are hiring locally, heating up the competition.

“It’s crazy,” said meetup organizer Doug Erickson, noting attendees drove from San Jose, Berkeley and San Francisco to check out what’s available.

Mackraz, 61, is leading the development of Amazon’s mobile application for sellers on the Amazon Marketplace. He has 23 openings and needs software developers for Android and iOS.

“Santa Cruz has a great entrepreneurial spirit,” he said, recalling the Cooper House before the 1989 earthquake.

Hisatomi, 50, has three people on a team to build Amazon’s business-to-business e-commerce market. He’s looking to hire software engineers, software managers, program managers, technical program managers and product managers.

When Hisatomi was asked why his team is in Santa Cruz, he said, “Jim has had great success in hiring people so we’re going to get in on that.”

Amazon Web Services has been operating in Santa Cruz since 2015. Now Amazon has taken over a second floor in the five-story Cooper House Building downtown.

Data analytics company Looker is expanding to the second floor of the Rittenhouse Building downtown. Looker has 300 employees worldwide, half in Santa Cruz, and plans to fill 50 positions locally.

JR Rettig, Looker’s recruiting chief, said she shares resumes with Amazon, which is a Looker customer.

Fullpower Technologies, an invention company started by Philippe Kahn of Borland and Lightsurf, has grown to 70 employees downtown. Fullpower provides the technology for BeautyRest’s “Sleeptracker” monitor and the Nike+ Running app and is recruiting for iOS and Android engineers, firmware and server-side engineering, audio signal processing engineering and database and front-end web development.

“I’ve got a promising stack of resumes,” said senior software engineer Kelsey Schwind, noting one perk is going out on Kahn’s boat for the Wednesday night races.

ProductOps, which builds tech solutions for business clients, has 30-plus employees downtown and plans to double in size in 2017-18. Openings are available for a cloud infrastructure engineer who’s an expert in Amazon Web Services, an Angular developer, a front-end designer and a product manager. Perks include unlimited paid time off and vacation.

At Santa Cruz Bicycles on the Santa Cruz Westside, recruitment coordinator Lauren Dockendorf has hired 20 people since January. She still has openings: three business systems analysts, plant operations director, quality assurance engineer, customer experience coordinator, maintenance supervisor and wheel and production assembly.

Joby Aviation, which has 70 employees in Bonny Doon building a vehicle with vertical takeoff and landing to avoid traffic jams, is looking for a pilot.

The company also is hiring engineers, electrical, mechanical, manufacturing, software, an accountant and an intellectual property attorney.

“We need all the talent we can get,” said Juliane Farrand, Joby’s director of finance and human resources.

Joby’s ambition: Get people from San Jose to San Francisco in 15 minutes, initially for $100, eventually for $20.

“It will be wonderful when they commercialize it,” said Chris Lucas of startup TechXellent.

“It’s so great to stay on this side of the hill,” said Jill Schontag, a Santa Cruz career counselor who came looking for opportunities for her clients.

TECH JOBS

Amazon: Downtown Santa Cruz: 23-plus openings.

Joby Aviation: Bonny Doon: 10 positions open.

Looker: Downtown Santa Cruz: 50 openings.

ProductOps: Downtown Santa Cruz: 30 openings.

Santa Cruz Bicycles: Westside: nine openings.

Modern Tribe: Santa Cruz: nine openings.

Fullpower: Downtown Santa Cruz: seven openings.

Cyxtera: Scotts Valley, up to five openings.

Inboard: Soquel, three openings, including community marketing manager.

Portable Cloud Nucleos: Capitola, seven positions.

Kakaxi: Campbell, two positions.