Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft Corp., departs the "Tech For Good" meeting at Elysee Palace in Paris, France, on Wednesday, May 23, 2018. A group of industry executives met with France's President Emmanuel Macron to discuss how to use technology to improve people's lives.

Microsoft is staffing up in preparation for its work with the Defense Department, even as Amazon is in court protesting the Pentagon's decision, according to people familiar with the matter.

In the more than six weeks since winning the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, deal, which is worth up to $10 billion, Microsoft has been trying to lure talent from defense contractors and other companies and get employees the necessary authorization to work on the project, said the people, who asked not to be named because they're not authorized to speak on behalf of the company.

Amazon has contested the Pentagon's decision to award the contract to its smaller cloud rival, citing in a lawsuit a bias on the part of President Donald Trump and repeated attacks against Amazon and CEO Jeff Bezos as evidence of an unfair process.

But Microsoft isn't slowing down. Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and chief legal officer, told CNBC on Saturday that "we have if anything been moving even faster since that contract was awarded."

Microsoft has a history with government contracts and has spent years going through the process of clearing employees for defense work, said two of the people. The company has hundreds of cleared engineers, one of the people said. But there are so many people in the pipeline that Microsoft faces an 18-month bottleneck getting current employees through the process, a different person said.

Microsoft's website lists more than 100 openings for people with security clearances, though none mention JEDI by name. Openings are for positions including principal software engineering managers and principal program managers. In January, Microsoft plans to hold two recruiting events in Reston, Virginia, near the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley.