Amazon Workforce Shake-Up: Massive 14,000 job cuts in 2025 driven by AI-led organisational overhaul

Amazon is making its largest workforce reductions to date, planning to slash 14,000 jobs in its corporate ranks in 2025. In a review of state WARN filings and news reports, we found that a little over 40% of those layoffs will be in engineering roles.

WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) filings at the state level – with significant representation in California, New York, New Jersey, and Washington – show that of the approximately 4,700 jobs laid off in those states thus far, 1,800 engineering roles were affected.
This is a sampling of the total layoffs and Amazon will likely announce additional state-specific or global numbers in the coming months. But already, the proportion of engineers in these cuts is noteworthy given the depth to which it signals the impacts.

The tech giant is not couching these layoffs as a response to underperformance or poor results. Instead, Amazon is making the case for the cuts as a strategic cultural reset – one that is necessary to make the company “leaner and faster” and more competitive for CEO Andy Jassy.
In an interview, the CEO made clear that the move supports Amazon’s more aggressive investment in generative AI, with the technology poised to automate many existing workflows across its various business units.

Amazon is among a host of tech companies announcing layoffs this year. Already in 2025, over 100,000 tech jobs have been shed at over 200 companies, a reflection of broader sector restructuring as firms align their talent strategies with automation, economic uncertainty, and changing business priorities.

As Amazon cuts corporate roles, the company is otherwise reporting strong financial results and its investments in AI are ongoing. In a memo to staff earlier this year, Jassy made clear that the use of AI agents within the company was expected to drive “a significant reduction in corporate roles over time.”
In this context, Amazon is describing these layoffs as part of an effort to remove organizational layers and more quickly make decisions to keep pace with the growing use of automation and AI-led technologies.

For those employees who are affected by these layoffs, the company is giving those staff 90 days to apply to open internal roles and offering severance packages, as well as outplacement support for those who are unable to find a new role within that time frame.

The latest round of cuts from Amazon underscores a growing trend across the tech sector: even as it spends billions on advanced AI, the e-commerce giant is also shedding a key pillar of its workforce – engineers. The move is a stark signal that Amazon believes automation is not just about doing things at a greater scale or with improved precision but about transforming how talent itself is organized for the future.