Online grocery technology firm Ocado Technology will create 500 new technology jobs following a £1 billion investment round.
The majority of the new roles will be software engineers and product managers located around European development centres.
The company confirmed that a "significant" number of these roles will be based at its recently launched London site, which announced 260 new jobs in July 2019.
During a four week period in April and May, a record £1.2 billion pounds was spent on buying online groceries, according to Nielsen. Ocado believes this demand will continue and as such, companies will accelerate the launch of their own online offerings to meet the increased demand.
Ocado Technology builds physical and digital technology for online grocery deliveries for itself and Morrisons in the UK, and a number of retailers around Europe. This includes Groupe Casino in France, ICA in Sweden and Bon Preu in Spain. The firm also operates in the US, Canada and Australia, with the Ocado Smart Platform launching soon in Japan, in partnership with Aeon.
The company's tech arm is looking to hire technologists in a variety of roles in web and app development, data science, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, smart optimisation, discrete event simulation, automation and robotics.
"The online grocery market in the UK has grown the same amount in the last 3 months as it had in the previous twenty years, and adoption of our platform, OSP, is accelerating too," said Isabel Richards, head of Ocado's UK development centres.
"Our engineers work on some of the most exciting challenges at the intersection of software and robotic hardware, which are truly making a difference to people's everyday lives. There are huge opportunities across the board for talented technologists to really change the way the world shops."
