Amazon Layoffs: 40% of Recent Job Cuts Target Engineers

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When Amazon announced its largest-ever workforce reduction in October, the headlines focused on the huge number of 14,000 jobs gone. But buried in the employment documents was a more telling story. Nearly 40% of those positions were engineers.

40% of Amazon’s Latest Job Cuts were Engineers

Out of over 4,700 job cuts reported across Washington, New York, New Jersey, and California, more than 1,800 were engineering roles.  This means 40% of the recent reduction of Amazon workforce are engineers.

This is according to documents submitted to Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) in the above U.S. states.

Impacted employees have 90 days to apply internally. Those who don’t find new roles will be offered severance and outplacement assistance.

Amazon claimed it’s about culture. Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology at Amazon, explained this reduction in their official blog:

“The reductions we’re sharing are a continuation of this work to get even stronger by further reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers’ current and future needs.”

Amazon’s video game division suffered significant role reductions, particularly in California studios. Game designers, artists, and producers made up over a quarter of cuts in Irvine alone. 

The visual search and shopping team, responsible for Amazon Lens, was largely eliminated. Software engineers, quality assurance testers, and applied scientists in Palo Alto found themselves jobless after building technology that Amazon had just promoted.

Even Amazon’s advertising business, one of its most profitable divisions, lost over 140 sales and marketing positions in New York, accounting for about 20% of the city’s cuts.

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Other than engineers, more than 500 product and program managers were cut as part of the layoffs, accounting for over 10% of all affected positions.

Amazon has warned that more layoffs are coming in 2026. The company might ultimately cut as many as 30,000 corporate positions, which would exceed its previous record of 27,000 layoffs in late 2022.

Since becoming the CEO, Andy Jassy has been driving an effort to reshape the company’s corporate culture into what he describes as “the world’s largest startup.” His approach focuses on reducing bureaucracy and encouraging employees to achieve more with fewer resources.

Even in the recent Q3 earnings call, Andy said that these cuts are not finance-driven. It’s about “culture”: 

“And if you grow as fast as we did for several years, the size of businesses, the number of people, the number of locations, the types of businesses you're in, you end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers. … And as a leadership team, we are committed to operating like the world's largest start-up. And that means removing layers. It means increasing the amount of ownership that people have, and it means inventing and moving quickly.”

The Bottom Line

AI coding assistants and automation tools are making it easier to write basic code, which means companies think they need fewer people to do the same work. 

Amazon even released its own AI coding tool called Kiro, essentially creating technology that might eventually replace some of its own engineers.

For the engineers who lost their jobs, the layoffs raise an important question that if Amazon can eliminate this many technical roles while claiming to need innovation, what does job security mean in tech anymore?

Amazon’s engineering cuts reveal a fundamental shift in how tech companies think about their workforce. They are betting they can do more with fewer layers, faster decisions, and AI tools filling the gaps left by departed employees. Whether that gamble pays off remains to be seen.