Amazon.com Inc. will add 15,000 workers in Bellevue, a city situated 10 miles from its hometown of Seattle, as part of a multiyear expansion plan unveiled this morning.

The employees will join the roughly 2,000 staff the online retail and cloud computing giant already has in the suburb. Amazon opened its first Bellevue office building three years ago, but its local presence goes back much further: Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos started the company in 1994 out of a three-bedroom house on the city’s western side.

A report last year indicated that the Amazon employees who will be working out of Bellevue will include not just new hires but also the company’s Worldwide Operations group. That’s the several-thousand-person unit responsible for coordinating package deliveries. 

A sizable portion of the 15,000 workers will be based out of a 43-story office tower Amazon is building in Bellevue’s downtown. The highrise (pictured, center, in a model released by Amazon), will have about a million square feet of office space and is set to open its doors in 2024. A planned light rail station nearby will link Bellevue with Seattle to let employees commute among the company’s corporate hubs.

The Bellevue expansion is one of several Amazon is pursuing in parallel. As part of its high-profile HQ2 project, the company is building two $2.5 billion corporate campuses in New York City and Virginia that are expected to house about 25,000 employees each.

Amazon is also rapidly adding staff to its logistics operations in order to support an ongoing transition from two-day to one-day Prime deliveries. This effort heavily contributed to the headcount growth Amazon reported in its annual 10-K filing last week, which revealed that the company’s global workforce increased 23% year-over-year to reach 798,000 personnel.

A big part of Amazon’s expansion is happening overseas. This past August, the company announced plans for a sprawling corporate hub in the Indian city of Hyderabad that’s expected to house 15,000 employees once everything is up and running.

Image: Amazon