Amazon layoffs test former staff in crowded tech job market

Amazon’s largest round of job reductions has pushed tens of thousands of former employees into a technology labor market already absorbing broad cuts, CNBC reported. The company eliminated about 16,000 roles in late January after cutting more than 14,000 three months earlier, while U.S. tech employers have announced roughly 140,000 layoffs this year, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

The pressure has been amplified by artificial intelligence spending and restructuring across the sector. Challenger said AI was the leading reason companies cited for layoffs for a fourth consecutive month and appeared in about 23% of all U.S. job-cut announcements in 2026. Tech layoffs reached 38,242 in May, the highest monthly total since August 2024, before falling to 15,503 in June, the firm’s data showed.

Amazon has cut more than 57,000 employees since 2022, equal to about 16% of its corporate workforce, CNBC reported. Layoffs.fyi data cited by CNBC indicated Amazon represented about 13% of tech industry job cuts this year.

Montana MacLachlan, an Amazon spokesperson, told CNBC the company made the reductions so it could move faster and better serve customers. She said Amazon continues to hire and invest in strategic areas, and that the company works to support affected staff. Amazon said AI was not the cause of most of the layoffs.

Job searches lengthen

Several former Amazon employees described a search market in which job postings quickly attracted hundreds of applicants. Courtney Haeflinger, who was laid off from Amazon Web Services in January, told CNBC she applied to hundreds of roles before accepting a position at AT&T last week. She said some listings drew 200 to 300 applicants soon after being posted, making it harder for candidates to secure interviews.

Jake Linsley, a former Amazon finance manager who spent nearly six years at the company, told CNBC he found a new role after about three months. He joined a health-care IT startup in April as a vice president. “I’d rather have a stable job than one that can grow 5x and disappear overnight,” he said.

Dorian Smith, who worked at Amazon for more than 10 years and moved from customer service into web development engineering, told CNBC he applied to at least 250 jobs and received responses from four companies, all rejections, before landing at a late-stage startup. He said the layoff was personally difficult because his identity had become tied to the company.

Amazon has also continued smaller reductions, including customer service roles in April and third-party seller support positions in May, CNBC reported, citing people familiar with the matter. A Washington state WARN filing released Monday showed 57 Amazon layoffs in the state between May and early June, with software engineering, program management and product roles among the listed titles.

AI changes work and budgets

Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy has told employees that AI “should change the way our work is done” and said efficiency gains will reduce the company’s total corporate workforce over the next few years. He has also urged staff to use AI tools and get more work done with smaller teams, according to CNBC.

Former employees told CNBC the shift is changing career calculations. Yogesh Verma, a former AWS engineer, took a slight pay cut in April to join an AI marketing company that he said offered better work-life balance and hybrid work. Chris DeSantis, a former senior product manager in Amazon’s retail organization, said he would accept lower pay to work closer to advanced AI projects.

CNBC reported that some Amazon managers track employee use of internal AI tools through dashboards, citing current and former employees. The company also closed an internal leaderboard called Kirorank in late May after finding that some employees were increasing token use to rise in the rankings, CNBC reported.

This story draws on original reporting from CNBC.