[DigitalBison]

Seconded, as another Amazonian working in a remote office. The Seattle HQ absolutely hires folks from all over, but many of the remote sites tend to hire more locally. In fact, many of the remote sites exist precisely because of the local labor market (e.g. NYC hiring people out of finance, advertising, etc).

Although given the planned scale for HQ2, I would imagine hiring practices for HQ2 to be closer to the "bring in people from everywhere" model rather than the "hire [almost] exclusively locally" model.