It has become pretty apparent that Uber wants to rule the world. But first, it needs an army.
The ride hailing service has hit the gas on its recruitment, providing a window into the company's plans moving forward. Job openings in the U.S. have almost doubled from the start of the year, adding up to 427 listings now, according to information compiled by data publishing and visualization firm Silk.co.
[seealso slug=http://sale-online.click/2015/06/17/uber-drivers-employees/%5D%3C/p%3E%3Cp%3ENorth America has the most openings of any continent, but Asia -- a region that is seen as crucial for Uber to reach the size that investors have forecast -- is a close second. Silk found 278 Uber job openings in Asia.
Data from uber-jobs.silk.co
Silk has been compiling Uber's job postings every six months to look for differences, and recently noticed that the company is about to go on a hiring spree.
Uber shouldn't have too much trouble paying these new employees. It's raised almost $6 billion, including about $2.6 billion in 2015 alone.
These jobs encompass everything from operations and engineering to marketing and finance, but does not include drivers. Nobody quite knows how many drivers Uber employs, but in the U.S. alone, more than 162,000 people drove four or more trips in December 2014, according to numbers released by the company. Uber could be in a tough spot if it has to consider those drivers as employees instead of contractors, an issue that recently came up in California.
The geographic location of the jobs is informative, but so are the types of jobs that Uber is looking to fill. Silk found that Uber is hiring fewer tech-focused jobs than one might expect.
"The relatively small percentage of engineering jobs compared to operational, support, marketing and policy jobs implies that Uber's backend is scaling very nicely and that it doesn't need much more engineering firepower to continue to grow the company. The bottlenecks now are likely drivers and growing individual markets, as well as opening new ones," wrote Caspar Egas, data journalist and analyst at Silk.