Amazon is set to eliminate nearly 800 corporate jobs across the San Francisco Bay Area, deepening a fresh round of cost-cutting that forms part of a 16,000-strong reduction in its US corporate workforce.
State filings reviewed this week show that 769 employees in San Francisco and Silicon Valley will be laid off from 28 April, according to reporting by the San Francisco Chronicle. The cuts represent one of Amazon’s largest regional workforce reductions in recent months.
The bulk of the layoffs are concentrated in Santa Clara County, where Amazon plans to cut 666 jobs across offices in Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Mountain View and Palo Alto. The filings indicate that the affected roles span engineering, product management and other corporate functions.
In San Francisco, Amazon disclosed plans to eliminate 103 positions at two downtown offices on Market Street and Spear Street, extending a pullback from a city where the company expanded aggressively over the past decade.
The Bay Area reductions are part of a wider retrenchment across California. Additional state notices show Amazon intends to cut 256 roles in Southern California, including offices in Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego, bringing the total number of California layoffs in this round to more than 1,000, the Chronicle reported.
At the national level, the company said last week that it plans to eliminate around 16,000 corporate roles across the US, marking its second major white-collar workforce reduction in three months, Reuters reported. The cuts do not affect warehouse or delivery workers.
Amazon has framed the layoffs as part of an effort to streamline decision-making and reduce organisational layers. “We’re convinced that we need to be organised more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business,” Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice-president for people experience and technology, said in a memo to employees cited by Reuters.
The latest job cuts underscore continued pressure on Big Tech employers to rein in costs after years of rapid expansion, particularly in high-cost markets such as Silicon Valley. Analysts expect further scrutiny of corporate headcounts as companies balance investment in artificial intelligence with slower growth in core businesses.