Amazon.com Inc., is looking for more than 100 IT professionals who are eligible for top secret clearance in its bid to challenge existing technology vendors for United States government intelligence projects.
The recruitment effort slated for September 24 to 25 is an invitation-only event at the cloud services giant’s Herndon, Va. facility.
Amazon is in need of systems support engineers, software developers, operations managers and cloud support engineer among others.
The U.S. government had earlier picked Amazon over IBM Corp. to build a cloud platform for the Central Intelligence Agency.
The award was protested by IBM (NYSE:IBM) which prevailed in an administrative ruling. Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has challenged the court decision to re-bid the project. The cloud services firm has characterized IBM as a fixed IT infrastructure provider that is a late entrant to cloud computing.
Government evaluation of the bids put the price of Amazon’s bid at US$148 million against IBM’s US$93 million, according to a report on the online technology site Computerworld.com.
The project required vendors to address several hypothetical scenarios such as processing 100 terabytes of data.
An analyst for IT trends analysis and consulting firm, Ptak, Noel & Associates LLC, said that CIA officials has “too casually” brushed off service outages suffered by Amazon.
IBM also said Amazon’s definition of availability “does not measure up to the mission critical needs of the federal government.”