Amazon layoffs: Documents filed in New York, California, New Jersey and Amazon’s home state show engineers were worst hit

Amazon announced last month that it is cutting around 14,000 corporate jobs. Amazon's senior vice president of people experience and technology, Beth Galetti shared a blog post announcing the job cuts. In the post, Galetti said the company is making "organizational changes across Amazon” that will result in an “overall reduction in our corporate workforce of approximately 14,000 roles”. However, some newly filed documents recently revealed that engineers bore the brunt of the cuts. As reported by CNBC, the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filings in New York, California, New Jersey and Washington show that nearly 40% of the more than 4,700 job cuts in those states were engineering roles, disproportionately affecting mid-level software engineers (SDE II). The filings represent only part of the total layoffs announced in October, as reporting requirements vary by state.

Amazon’s steepest cuts in 31 years

As per the report, the job cuts mark the largest layoff round in Amazon’s history, aligning the company with other tech giants that have slashed jobs despite strong profits. As reported by Layoffs.fyi, nearly 113,000 jobs have been cut across 231 tech companies in 2025, continuing a post-pandemic trend of belt-tightening.

AI and efficiency pressures

Amazon insists AI was not the main cause for the layoffs, the company is shifting resources toward artificial intelligence. Jassy has predicted that corporate headcount will shrink in coming years as efficiency gains from AI take hold. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has been pushing to reshape Amazon’s culture into what he calls “the world’s largest startup,” urging teams to operate leaner and faster by cutting layers of bureaucracy. “The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it's not even really AI-driven, not right now at least,” Jassy said while speaking at the company’s quarterly earnings call. “It really — it's culture,” he added.



“And if you grow as fast as we did for several years, the size of businesses, the number of people, the number of locations, the types of businesses you're in, you end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers,” Jassy explained during the earnings call.

Gaming, ads, and experimental units also hit

The WARN filling also showed significant cuts in other division as well. The layoffs impacted Game designers, artists, and producers made up over a quarter of layoffs in Irvine and 11% in San Diego. Amazon is halting much of its work on big-budget MMO titles, including a planned Lord of the Rings game.

Also units behind Amazon Lens and Lens Live were heavily impacted, particularly in Palo Alto. More than 140 ad sales and marketing roles were eliminated in New York, about 20% of the 760 positions cut there.Over 500 roles were eliminated, representing more than 10% of total cuts.