By Will Anderson – Digital Editor, Austin Business Journal As Amazon.com Inc. considers where to build its second headquarters, there is little indication of where the company is leaning. CEO Jeff Bezos and his fellow executives have made it a very open, highly competitive process. But one thing is clear: Over the past two years, the Seattle-based retail and technology giant has built its Austin operations into much more of a self-sustaining hub. Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) opened a local office two years ago with about 100 employees inside of a single mid-rise in The Domain, a mixed-use community in North Austin. It has since grown to about 900 workers spread across more than 240,000 square feet in both the Domain 7 and Domain 8 buildings. The company on Friday invited some members of the media into Domain 8 for the first time, where it expanded to in June, as well as family members of workers for its first Bring Your Grandparents to Work Day. VIEW SLIDESHOW 13 photos The new offices were designed to host more customer meetings and executive briefings, with large conference rooms. Bright and colorful art decorates the walls, and some of the rooms are named after local universities, restaurants and cities, a popular thing among local tech firms that design new offices. Owing to Austin's reputation for live music, vinyl record albums and a general music motif decorate the main reception area. "We're not big on sterile environments here," said Terry Leeper, Amazon's top executive in Austin and chief technology officer of Amazon Business, a B2B platform similar to the company's consumer-facing website. "We want to have a very positive feel for our employees." Amazon's expanded footprint in Austin reflects the natural maturation of its business operations here, Leeper said. The office opened in 2015 mainly with software and hardware engineers focused on highly technical projects such as Amazon Web Services and functions of the Amazon.com website. But it has grown into a much more diverse mix, with teams working on sales, big data, the Alexa intelligent personal assistant and more. The company has nearly 100 openings in Austin, from software development engineers to business development roles to data engineers to recruiters to sales executives, according to the Amazon website. "When you first start... you're trying to get a critical mass," Leeper said. "Later on you can add these more specialized roles and then it becomes much more of a complete package." Enlarge That means Amazon workers in Austin can transfer between teams or try different roles without having to move across the country. "That was one of the goals of this site, to be large enough where we had those kinds of opportunities for employees," Leeper said. "If somebody wants to go Seattle, that's fine, but the point was you don't have to go to Seattle to continue a career." Hosting the parents and grandparents of employees was also a chance to explain Amazon's products and services to older generations that have seen significant technological change in their lifetimes, Leeper said.