Uber is cutting about 3,300 jobs, roughly 10 per cent of its global workforce, in the company’s biggest round of layoffs since the pandemic years. The ride-hailing giant confirmed the restructuring on Wednesday, a move first reported by Bloomberg News and detailed by Reuters.
CEO Dara Khosrowshahi set out the plans in a note to employees. He argued that five years of rapid expansion had left the company top-heavy, writing that growth had brought “more layers, more coordination, more fragmented ownership”. The cuts target management and coordination roles rather than drivers or couriers.
The numbers behind the overhaul are unusually specific. Uber plans to shrink the population of employees sitting seven or more reporting layers below the chief executive by 20 per cent, and to cut the number of micro-teams, those with only one or two direct reports, by nearly half. Fully remote positions will be limited to about 1 per cent of staff, according to the memo reported by TechCrunch and Al Jazeera.
What is happening to the org chart tells its own story. Engineering, science and delivery divisions are being merged, and restaurant, retail and direct delivery operations are being pulled under one roof. Some managers will move back into individual contributor roles.
The timing is not accidental. Uber faces mounting pressure from robotaxis, which threaten to undercut the core ride-hailing business, and the company has said it intends to invest around $10bn building that autonomous presence, Al Jazeera reports. It also trimmed 10 per cent of its customer service team in July, a cut it attributed to AI, and announced a hiring slowdown in May.
For the wider tech labour market the message is blunt. Companies that spent the pandemic era hiring are now paying down that decision, and AI is the excuse of choice whether or not it is the cause. Financial results have largely beaten expectations this year, which makes the restructuring about efficiency and control as much as about cost.
Uber employs tens of thousands of corporate staff worldwide and says the reorganisation will mean “clearer ownership, faster decisions, and more time spent building rather than coordinating”. Whether a leaner Uber is a nimbler one will depend on how quickly the robotaxi threat turns from a slide in an investor deck into a car at the kerb.