Amazon has today announced plans to open a new corporate office in Manchester in 2019. The office, in Manchester’s iconic Hanover Building, will be home to at least 600 new corporate and research and development (R&D) roles.

The six-storey, 90,000 sq. ft. site will see highly-skilled teams will working on projects benefitting Amazon’s customers around the world, including software development, machine learning and R&D – complementing existing work at Development Centres in London, Cambridge and Edinburgh.

The new site will be Amazon’s first UK corporate office outside London and is scheduled to open next year.

Alongside the new Manchester office, Amazon will also expand its Development Centre in the heart of Edinburgh, providing capacity for more than 250 new, highly-skilled roles. The expansion provides Amazon with three floors in the city’s iconic Waverley Gate building. The new roles will join hundreds of software engineers, machine learning scientists and user experience designers already working at the Scotland Development Centre. Teams in Edinburgh work on new advertising technology and personalised shopping recommendations, benefitting Amazon customers and employees around the world.

Amazon’s Cambridge Development Centre will also receive new investment for expansion, creating capacity for an additional 180 new roles. The Development Centre houses R&D teams that bring new innovation to millions of Amazon customers around the globe, including: Amazon Devices, Amazon Alexa (the brain that powers devices such as Amazon Echo, Echo Dot and Echo Show); AWS; Prime Air (a future delivery system to safely get packages to customers in 30 minutes or less using drones) and core machine learning and retail systems, improving the shopping experience for Amazon customers.

Secretary of State for International Trade, The Rt Hon Liam Fox MP, said: “Ensuring that the world’s best and brightest companies continue to invest and innovate in the UK is at the heart of our Global Britain agenda. Amazon’s decision to create hundreds of highly-skilled jobs in Manchester, Edinburgh and Cambridge is an enormous vote of confidence in the UK and a signal to the world that the UK is very much open for business.”

Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, The Rt Hon Jeremy Wright MP, said: “It is great global tech giant Amazon has chosen Manchester, a vital part of the Northern Powerhouse, to open their new office and are creating hundreds of high-skilled jobs up and down the country. Our booming digital sector is one of the fastest-growing industries in the UK and this is a vote of confidence in our world-leading skills in tech innovation.”

“With the UK taking a leading role in our global innovation, we are delighted to announce plans to create capacity for over 1,000 new highly-skilled roles across the country,” said Doug Gurr, UK Country Manager, Amazon. “These are Silicon Valley jobs in Britain, and further cement our long-term commitment to the UK.”