Uber lays off 3,300 people, 10% of staff, to flatten management and back robotaxis

Uber is laying off roughly 3,300 people, about 10% of its global workforce, in a restructuring meant to strip out management layers and steer more investment toward its ride-sharing, delivery and robotaxi businesses. According to TechCrunch, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced the changes in an internal email published online on Wednesday; Bloomberg was first to report the layoffs.

Flatter organisation, fewer managers

The restructuring will cut the number of managers at Uber by 20%, and some people now in management roles will stay on as individual contributors rather than leaving, TechCrunch reports. Bloomberg adds two further measures: the number of teams with only one or two members will be halved, and employees positioned more than seven layers below the CEO will be let go.

Uber is also consolidating how it builds products. Per the email, the company is merging its engineering, science and delivery divisions into one organisation, and pulling together the delivery operations currently spread across its restaurants, retail and direct business lines.

Remote roles all but eliminated

The changes reach into working arrangements as well. Uber is doing away with remote jobs, and going forward fewer than 1% of its staff will be permitted to work remotely, effectively returning nearly the entire company to offices.

The CEO's reasoning

Khosrowshahi framed the cuts as a consequence of growth. In the email, he wrote that Uber has shipped new products, entered new lines of business and become a far larger and stronger company on both the consumer and earner side. That expansion, he argued, also brought complexity: extra management layers, heavier coordination, ownership scattered across too many groups, and organisational choices that fit an earlier, smaller era rather than the company's current scale.

Why it matters

A 10% reduction at Uber's scale — the figures imply a global headcount of around 33,000 — makes this one of the larger single workforce cuts in the tech industry in recent memory. Three things stand out. First, the restructuring explicitly names robotaxis as a destination for reinvested savings, underlining how central autonomous driving has become to Uber's plans rather than remaining a side bet. Second, the specifics — 20% fewer managers, a cap on how deep the organisation can grow, the elimination of tiny teams — are a concrete version of the broader tech-industry push to thin out middle management after years of pandemic-era hiring. Third, allowing under 1% of staff to work remotely ranks among the strictest return-to-office positions at a major technology company, a marker other firms may point to. The open question is execution: merging engineering, science and delivery while removing thousands of colleagues is a delicate operation, and Uber will need to show that a flatter structure actually translates into faster progress across ride-sharing, delivery and autonomy.