Amazon has created 10,000 new jobs at the company across Europe in 2015, the company announced, and it plans to create several thousand more new jobs in Europe in 2016. Amazon currently employs over 40,000 people across Europe.

The 10,000 new permanent roles added in 2015 is the most Amazon has created in a single year in Europe and a 50 percent increase over 2014. In 2016, the company is investing to expand its European fulfilment network, increase EU-based research and development, and build new infrastructure to support its growing cloud-computing business, among other initiatives.

“We are seeing stronger demand than ever from our customers all across Europe, and we see lots more opportunity across Amazon’s businesses to invent and invest for the future,” said Xavier Garambois, Vice President, Amazon EU Retail. “We created over 10,000 new jobs in 2015 and plan to create several thousand more in 2016, from linguistic scientists to digital media experts to fulfilment center and customer service associates.”

Amazon has invested over $16 billion since 2010 on infrastructure and operations in Europe. The company operates a pan EU business with over 80 corporate offices, fulfilment centers, seller and customer service centers, R&D centers, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) datacenter regions. The company recently announced new investments in London for a new UK head office and a new datacenter region for AWS customers. The UK datacenter region is in addition to the existing AWS datacenter regions in Frankfurt and in Dublin.

Amazon is hiring more computer scientists and software development engineers across its European network of 12 research and development centers.

Amazon is also helping employees build skills for new careers within and outside of Amazon. To date, over 1,000 Amazon employees in Europe have participated in Career Choice, Amazon’s adult education program that pays 95 percent of tuition and associated fees for permanent employees to undertake courses for up to four years.