Just weeks ago in January, Amazon laid off around 16,000 employees, after cutting roughly 14,000 roles in the final months of 2025. In total the e-commerce giant let go of around 30,000 employees and rumours suggest that a few more are in store as it leans more heavily into automation and AI. And yet, there is another side of the story, the one that AWS chief Matt Garman is highlighting. In an interview Garman has said that AI is not replacing software developers and that Amazon intends to hire 11,000 interns and developers in 2026.
Speaking at AWS What’s Next event, Garman on Tuesday noted that Amazon would continue to hire, and demand for software engineers remained strong. The CEO confirmed that this year Amazon plans to hire around 11,000 software development interns and full-time employees.
It’s worth noting that the latest round of layoffs also affected the cloud division, AWS, with several managerial roles being cut. However, Garman pushed back against the narrative that AI was impacting jobs. He argued that it was not eliminating roles but reshaping them. He said the idea that AI agents were wiping out jobs was overblown.
“I can tell you we are hiring just as many software developers as we ever had inside of Amazon,” Garman said. “And in fact, I see the demand for that really accelerating.” He added that Amazon planned to hire around 11,000 software development engineer (SDE) interns and full-time employees this year, stressing that “this is not jobs going away.”
According to Garman, what is changing rapidly is not the number of jobs, but the nature of them. AI agents — which are the systems that can operate autonomously and continuously — are now “exploding across every industry” and evolving faster than expected.
These agents are increasingly taking over repetitive, time-consuming tasks such as debugging, writing routine code, or handling operational workflows. But instead of reducing the need for engineers, Garman argues, they are freeing developers to focus on higher-value work like system design, architecture, and solving complex customer problems.
“The jobs will be a little bit different,” he said, noting that while writing small code snippets may become less critical, understanding how systems fit together is becoming more valuable than ever.
Garman added that this shift is already visible inside Amazon. Teams are fixing bugs in minutes instead of weeks and rebuilding large systems significantly faster using AI-assisted tools. Sharing one such example from his office, Garman notes that a project that was expected to take two years was completed in just two quarters, highlighting how AI is compressing development timelines rather than shrinking teams.