Last November, we announced that Arlington, Virginia would be the home of our second headquarters. We’ve enjoyed a warm welcome from the community and the strong support from state and local government has allowed us to make significant progress towards establishing our presence here. We are ahead of schedule and on pace to create 400 new jobs this year and a total of 25,000 over the next decade plus.

Today marks an important step in the process as we lease office space and begin hiring. We will welcome our new employees to our temporary office space on Crystal Drive in June while we work toward opening our first building this fall.

We posted our first few job listings this morning. While the number is small, these employees will help build the foundation of our workforce and workplace. The human resources leaders will help us recruit diverse and customer-obsessed teams and the finance, sourcing and facilities professionals will support the development of our new sites with the goal of building a unique, sustainable, and urban campus for our employees and the local community.

Over the past four years, I have had the privilege to build and grow programs at Amazon that help equip our employees with the right skills for the jobs of today – and tomorrow. Programs like our technical apprenticeship program that provides both classroom and hands on training in a variety of technical roles for transitioning veterans, and Career Choice, an innovative upskilling program that prepares hourly employees for high demand roles with a career path whether at Amazon or elsewhere. I recently moved with my husband from Seattle to lead our workforce development initiatives here in Arlington and am excited to work with such a rich and experienced group of experts in the region.

Since the beginning of this year, the Amazon team has been working with community members, educators, and state and local experts on how to increase the talent available in this region to make Virginia an even more attractive destination for innovators large and small. We have a unique opportunity to build programs that both support the skills development necessary to create a pipeline for jobs at Amazon, and also increase the talent pool in the DMV.

We recently announced that we will support funding for intro and AP computer science classes in 27 schools across Virginia as part of our Amazon Future Engineer program – a childhood-to-career program to inspire, educate and propel children and young adults from underserved and underrepresented communities to pursue careers in computer science. Similarly, we also support dozens of schools across the Commonwealth through monetary and in-kind donations to promote literacy programs and robotics clubs.

We have called Virginia home since 2010 and have already invested more than $34 billion in the Commonwealth, including infrastructure and compensation to our employees, and will be investing billions more in the coming years. We hope our continued investments will create more opportunity for the region’s skilled workforce and underrepresented communities.

I encourage any interested candidates to take a look at our first job postings, learn what it's like to work at Amazon, meet current Amazonians—and most importantly, keep checking back for updates. We plan to post more roles soon.