Amazon will boost its research and development in the UK and open a new development centre in Cambridge this autumn. It will be Amazon’s second facility in Cambridge.

The new building at One The Square in the CB1 business district will feature over 60K SF and capacity for 400 employees, including machine learning specialists, knowledge engineers, data scientists, mathematics modellers, speech scientists and software engineers. The teams will be working on Alexa, Kindle, Fire tablet, Fire TV Stick, Echo, Echo Dot and the new Echo Look. Amazon is also recruiting extensively in Cambridge as part of its expansion plans in the city.

Once the new site opens, the current Development Centre building at Castle Hill will be used primarily for research and development for Prime Air, a delivery system from Amazon designed to safely get parcels to customers in 30 minutes or less using drones.

Amazon UK country manager Doug Gurr said that by the end of this year, the massive retailer will have more than 1,500 innovation-related roles in Britain.

Amazon has invested £6.4B across the UK since 2010 and has pledged to create 5,000 new roles across the country, bringing its full-time workforce to 24,000.