Will Amazon.com prove immune to the layoffs gripping the rest of the tech industry? A lot of the speculation at the moment is focused on the Seattle area's other tech giant, Microsoft, which is rumored to be planning layoffs this month (See my colleague Todd Bishop's reality check on the Microsoft chatter).

Amazon's staff totaled approximately 17,000 full- and part-time employees at the end of 2007, and has been climbing steadily for years, according to the company's annual 10K filings.

What kind of hiring is Amazon doing right now?

I went through Amazon's job postings for November and December of 2008, and found the company is recruiting a significant number of  positions in web services and advertising. While the job postings don't tell the whole story, they provide a rough snapshot of where Amazon may be beefing up -- and which business lines it's looking to emphasize in 2009.

Of the 112 job openings posted on Amazon's website for the last two months of the year, 19 positions are with Amazon Web Services, the business unit that's seeking to leverage Amazon's vast data center network to sell computing storage and computing power to outside developers.

Another 18 job postings are in online advertising, most of them display advertsing. Of those, five positions are with Adzinia, a separate advertising company set up by Amazon. I explored Adzinia -- and its somewhat mysterious role -- in a post a couple months ago. As I noted at the time, it may seem odd to pump more resources into online advertising at a time when many advertisers are reining in their budgets, but Amazon has often bucked convention in the past.

The other job openings on the Amazon site are a mix of software engineers, buyers and merchandisers. There are a couple open positions with Amazon's electronic book reader, the Kindle, and with IMDb.com, the Amazon-owned movie information and trivia site (which recently bought rival site Box Office Mojo).

Amazon's next 10K filing for 2008 will give a sense of its overall employment picture, unless of course the company makes any announcements before then.