Uber is laying off 93 Washington state-based employees as part of a sweeping global restructuring that will eliminate roughly 10% of the company’s workforce.
The cuts heavily impact the transportation giant’s Seattle hub, targeting those assigned to the downtown engineering center as well as regional remote workers.
The job losses are detailed in a new Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notice filed by the company with the state’s Employment Security Department, which lists impacted positions ranging from software engineers to senior managers.
Affected staff were notified Wednesday and will receive full pay and benefits through a 60-day notice period ending Nov. 2. The cuts hit technical roles particularly hard, with position titles including software engineers, product managers, data scientists, and a Seattle-based director of engineering.
Nationally, the cuts eliminate about 3,300 corporate jobs — roughly 10% of Uber’s global workforce — in the company’s largest round of layoffs since 2020. In a memo to staff, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi framed the restructuring as a move to eliminate middle-management bureaucracy, flattening reporting structures by reducing management layers and cutting “micro-teams” by nearly half.
As part of the overhaul, Uber is also clamping down on remote work, capping fully remote positions at less than 1% of its total workforce and requiring most employees to move near core office hubs like San Francisco and New York. Khosrowshahi noted that savings from the cuts will help free up capital to invest in core operations, including autonomous vehicle partnerships.
Uber first established its engineering outpost in Seattle in March 2015 to tap into the region’s pool of tech talent. The company expanded significantly in 2018 when it signed a 10-year lease for 115,000 square feet at downtown’s Second & Seneca building at 1191 Second Ave.
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