Amazon details Indian operations

On the site, Amazon's Development Center India explains its areas of focus, describes its work environment and posts job openings for the Seattle-based company's Bangalore development outpost.

"We are focused on some of the biggest game-changing initiatives in extremely competitive areas where innovation is the key to success and the environment that we work plays an important role in getting us in the zone," the site reads. "We are focused on some really challenging, complex problems in large-scale computing that have been baffling several leading researchers and are solving them within the context of real customers."

Amazon's Bangalore center is part of a larger, controversial practice by American companies of setting up shop overseas, particularly to India and other centers of high-tech talent where wages are lower than in the United States. That trend continues to expand despite the controversy and some mixed results. At the same time, domestic sites that are cheaper than Silicon Valley and other traditional high-tech centers have begun to flex their corporate recruiting muscle.

Amazon's Indian center is a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon that describes itself as "an autonomous and independent development center that can innovate quickly." The center is organized in development groups, known at Amazon as "Two-Pizza Teams," of six to eight people.

Amazon could not immediately be reached for comment.

The Web site said the center is focused on both features for Amazon's consumer-oriented Web sites and on Amazon Web Services, which the company's system launched in July 2002 to let external software developers access the company's horde of product data.

The site said its A9 Development Center was working on improving the capabilities of Amazon's new A9.com search engine.

"We see a big gap between where the customer requirements are and what today's search solutions can provide," the center said in its Web site message. "To meet customer needs, we are inventing technologies--and partnering with solutions that do exist. We have end-to-end ownership of search areas aimed at improving the overall A9 experience."

Other areas of Amazon research in Bangalore include text and data mining, distributed systems, storage systems, information retrieval, machine learning, and graph theory.

The site posted job openings for positions including software development architects and engineers, product managers, and recruiters.