Amazon is advertising for Australian workers for Project Kuiper, its low earth orbiting (LEO) satellite program.

It comes as Amazon reveals plans to launch within two years a satellite broadband service in the UK.

According to Amazon’s jobs board, the company is currently seeking Sydney-based staff to fill Project Kuiper roles for Australia and New Zealand including Consumer Partnerships Lead, Senior Product Manager and Senior Systems Development Engineer – Ground Infrastructure.

The latter job includes mentoring, design and coding.

Still from Amazon Project Kuiper video showing satellites circling the globe.

“As a System Development Engineer, you will build tools and processes for monitoring, operating and scaling ground infrastructure to millions of users around the globe. Using metrics, scalability in design and continuous improvement, you will automate repetitive processes to eliminate outages and enable high availability of the ground infrastructure.”

It says the position may require access to information, technology or hardware that is subject to export control laws and regulations, “including the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR)”.

“Employment in this position is contingent upon obtaining any required export licenses or other approvals from the United States government,” Amazon says. “As such, the successful candidate must be eligible to obtain any necessary export licenses or approvals based on their nationality, citizenship and any other factors considered by the applicable export control regulations.”

Amazon says the team comprises a leader and System Development Engineers in North America, Europe and Australia. 

“The overall mission is to ensure Kuiper Ground Infrastructure is always available to serve customers.”

No salary is mentioned.

Amazon plans to build a constellation of more than 3,200 LEO satellites to compete with Elon Musk’s Starlink.

 

Amazon Project Kuiper PR shot.

It says more than 2,000 “world-class engineers, programmers and support personnel” are working on Project Kuiper, having been drawn from industries including space, aerospace, wireless technology and computer networking.

There are labs in Washington state, and in US cities including New York, Austin, Denver, San Diego and Washington DC.

While the vast majority of Project Kuiper jobs are in the US (there are currently 332 vacancies in Washington state, 27 in California, 16 in Virginia, nine in Florida and seven in Texas), there are a handful of international vacancies, including six in England, four in Australia (all based in Sydney), three in Japan, two each in Canada and India, and one each in Istanbul, Turkey, Taiwan, Luxembourg and Poland.

Amazon Ofcom.

Britain’s Sunday Telegraph reported that Amazon would seek to access British radio frequencies within the next one to two years, according to a regulatory filing with Ofcom in the UK.

Ofcom is the British communications regulator.