Amazon announced Wednesday that it will eliminate roughly 16,000 corporate roles — a second wave of cuts that follows a 14,000-job reduction in October and brings the company’s headcount rebalancing into sharp focus.
What happened
In a company post, Senior Vice President Beth Galetti said the reductions are meant to “strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.” The note, shared internally and published on Amazon’s site, says the changes will affect approximately 16,000 roles and outlines support for impacted employees, including a 90-day window for most U.S.-based employees to search internally, severance pay, outplacement services and benefits where applicable. Read the company post here: Update on our organization.
Why now — and why it matters
This is not a one-off tweak. Executives at Amazon have been vocal about slimming management layers and reorienting teams to move faster; CEO Andy Jassy has additionally suggested efficiency gains from generative AI will reshape what corporate work looks like over the coming years. That broader industry push toward automation and AI — visible in many firms’ product and infrastructure plans, including new image and assistant models — gives the company both levers and incentives to rethink what roles are needed and where it should invest.
Amazon has been explicitly re-allocating resources into areas it calls strategic for the future: AI, cloud infrastructure, and physical retail experiments that scale. The company’s pivot toward AI-driven capabilities sits alongside a crowded field of new models and tools; for context, Microsoft and others are rolling out new image and multimodal systems like MAI‑Image‑1, and Google is building more agentic experiences such as its AI Mode agentic booking. Those moves matter because — whether through productivity tools or automation — they can reduce the need for certain repeatable tasks while creating demand for different skills. You can also see how search and research tools are tightening workflows in features like Gemini Deep Research.
The mechanics: how Amazon is handling the reductions
Galetti’s note says teams that began changes months ago have finished some reorganizations, while others did not complete them until now. For U.S.-based employees most affected, Amazon is offering a 90-day internal job search period (international timing will vary by local rules). Employees who don’t find a new role or choose not to look will receive transition support that, per the company, includes severance, outplacement help and health coverage where applicable.
There was also a hiccup this week: an apparent internal email sent to some AWS employees mistakenly acknowledged ongoing "organizational changes," briefly tipping off staff ahead of wider notices.
Big-picture math and recent moves
Taken together with October’s reductions, the 16,000 roles bring Amazon’s corporate and tech cuts since last autumn to roughly 30,000. That figure represents a meaningful share of its white-collar workforce: Amazon has said its corporate and tech headcount is on the order of a few hundred thousand employees, while total headcount (including warehouse and logistics staff) remains well over a million.
The layoffs come as Amazon also reshuffles its grocery strategy — announcing plans to close or convert many Amazon Fresh and Go locations into Whole Foods stores — part of a broader effort to focus on businesses the company says can scale with a sustainable economics.
What this likely means for workers and the company
For affected employees it’s immediate disruption: job searches, relocation questions, and career pivots toward skills in AI, cloud, product, and operations. For Amazon, the stated aim is a leaner corporate structure that can move faster and pour capital into big bets like data centers, AI tooling and scalable retail formats.
Pressure to cut bureaucracy, combined with rapid AI adoption across the industry, suggests other companies will be watching. That does not mean identical moves are inevitable everywhere, but it does change hiring calculus: firms will increasingly trade headcount in some roles for investments in automation, tooling and new team structures.
The human detail matters here — packages, timing, and local laws will shape individual outcomes — and the conversation inside big tech about speed, ownership and office culture is far from settled. Amazon says it doesn’t intend to make broad reductions a regular cadence, but it also makes clear teams will continue to reassess their organization as the business and technology landscape evolves.