Amazon.com Inc. today announced plans to add 10,000 new employees in Bellevue, Washington on top of the 15,000 workers it was already looking to hire in the city before.  

Bellevue is currently home to about 2,000 Amazon personnel. It’s about 15 minutes or so by car from Seattle, which hosts Amazon’s global headquarters, and the two cities will soon have a light-rail line connecting them that will enable workers to more easily commute between the company’s different offices.

Amazon said the extra 10,000 employees will be brought aboard “in the next few years.” That time frame is presumably tied at least partially to the expected completion times of the office buildings the company is developing in Bellevue, which are set to inaugurated over the next few years as well. The biggest development, the Bellevue 600 tower, sits right next to the planned light rail station that will connect the city with Seattle.

John Schoettler, Amazon’s vice president of global real estate and facilities, shared an update on the company’s Bellevue real-estate plans in the blog post announcing the hiring push. The executive said that Amazon is renting a 42-story skyscraper and a three-tower complex in the city’s downtown to accommodate its growing workforce. The developments, which are both still under construction, will put about a million square feet of additional office space at the company’s disposal.

“These projects will provide our teams with state-of-the-art office space, and the community with new amenities – such as public parks and retail space – to help fulfill the city’s vision of a thriving, connected, and pedestrian-friendly business district,” Schoettler wrote.

Bellevue is just one of the many cities where the online retail and cloud giant is hiring to support its growth. The company recently announced plans to recruit 3,500 extra workers in Dallas, Detroit, Denver, New York, Phoenix and San Diego as part of a $1.4 billion expansion plan. Amazon on Thursday said it will also add 7,000 staff in the U.K. by year’s end.

As the company’s workforce and operations have grown, so has its real-estate footprint. Amazon disclosed in a February 2019 regulatory filing that it had 288 million square feet of offices, warehouses, retail stores and data centers worldwide as of the end of 2018. That figure reportedly amounted to over four times the floor space of all the office buildings in Seattle at the time.

Image: Amazon