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Amazon at home in Boston digs

Amazon unveiled a new office in Boston’s Fort Point for nearly 1,000 employees, the latest step in the tech giant’s ongoing expansion in the city.

“What we’re really looking at is where can we hire the people we want to hire?” said Mike Touloumtzis, the head of Amazon’s offices in Cambridge and Boston. “They’re here.”

The new office takes up six floors at 27 Melcher St., more than 150,000 square feet. Each floor includes a transportation-related theme, and is centered on ways Amazon packages make their way to customers. Living room style chairs and tables are tucked into little nooks throughout the office.

Only about 350 employees work at the new office right now, but Touloumtzis said the remaining 550 will be hired soon. The office will largely work on Amazon Web Service, a storage and cloud computing business, along with transportation and logistics technology.

Though there are plenty of empty desks, the Melcher Street office won’t be Amazon’s newest office in the region for long. Amazon has already announced another 2,000 jobs across 15 floors in a new office tower in the Seaport District expected to be completed in 2021. The city and the Bay State have committed $25 million in tax and infrastructure incentives tied to a commitment from Amazon to create 2,000 jobs by 2025. Amazon currently employs about 1,200 in the Boston area.

“With the kind of growth rate we have, you grab the real estate you can ... you try to stay ahead of it,” Touloumtzis said. “Boston is such a higher ed hub, there’s new people entering the workforce from here.”

Despite the huge number of openings to fill — Amazon’s careers page lists 388 jobs in Boston and Cambridge — Touloumtzis said he doesn’t expect many recruitment issues.

“My perception is people really want to work here,” he said. “It’s not been tremendously challenging to pursue them.”

Touloumtzis stressed, as Amazon has said before, that the company’s expansion in Boston is completely separate from its ongoing HQ2 search. Boston is one of 20 finalists for the massive headquarters that is expected to bring 50,000 jobs to the winning city.

Still, Boston employees — like many outside the company — have been following HQ2 developments closely. Some internal betting pools have even popped up, Touloumtzis said.

“It’s totally independent from the growth that we’re talking here, the organic growth that we’re talking here is its own thing,” Touloumtzis said. “We’re obviously curious.”