Amazon Moves to State Street

The anticipated opening of Amazon’s new State Street office on Monday morning, January 6, was a modest affair, at least from appearances. As a homeless couple watched from a nearby bench, smartly dressed employees quietly entered the white stucco building, passing a security sensor in the front lobby and a table set up with mimosas and “Day 1” balloons. They disappeared behind walls of frosted glass while a smiling receptionist accepted a reporter’s business card and promised a representative would call him later to answer questions about the company’s Santa Barbara operations.

The call never came, but online job listings and the tech giant’s renovation permit for the former Saks Off Fifth store reveal that the company will be employing around 300 research and development staff with Huxleyan titles such as “Knowledge Architect” and “Machine Learning Engineer.” They will be working here on Alexa, Amazon’s voice-activated virtual assistant. Many came from the company’s Cambridge Development Centre in England. Others were relocated from just a few miles away at Graphiq, the Summerland-based data analytics and search engine startup that Amazon bought in 2017.

“We collaborate daily with our incredibly talented team to ensure Alexa understands different sentence structures and answers with accurate information,” said Gabrielle G. on Amazon’s website. “The challenge is making this work across 7 different languages.” Cody O. oversees Alexa’s “Global Knowledge Engineering” team out of the State Street office. He’s a strong adherent of the company’s “Deliver Results” and “Are Right, A Lot” leadership principles, the site says. While exact salary figures are difficult to come by, the positions are apparently well-paying. Realtors say Amazon employees can afford Santa Barbara’s high housing prices, and more than one local family has complained they’ve lost their domestic help to better offers.