Engineers laid off in the hundreds at LinkedIn in latest slash to workforce

Iconic job-search platform LinkedIn is planning on gutting 606 California jobs in July, the majority of which will come from its Bay Area workforce.

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The Microsoft-owned company announced new layoffs in a WARN notice filed Friday with the California Employment Development Department. The document, obtained by SFGATE, reveals LinkedIn is parting ways with 352 employees in Mountain View, 108 in San Francisco, 59 in Sunnyvale, 21 in Carpinteria and 66 remote workers living in California. In a memo to staff, first reported by Business Insider, CEO Daniel Shapero announced LinkedIn would be “scaling back investments” and reducing roles in its global business organization, marketing, engineering and product sectors.

According to the company’s WARN filing, of the 606 total cuts, at least 519 apply to Bay Area employees, largely those in engineering roles. It’s similar to LinkedIn’s last round of layoffs nearly a year ago, which eliminated 281 California employees, also mainly engineers. 

In a statement sent to SFGATE on Tuesday, LinkedIn spokesperson Leonna Spilman referred to the layoffs as “organizational changes” to set the company up for “future success.”

“Economic opportunity is one of the societal issues of our time, and LinkedIn has been and will continue to be the platform that professionals and companies turn to as they navigate the changing world of work,” Shapero wrote in a May 13 memo to employees. “For us to meet this moment, we must ready ourselves to deliver a step change in impact across our products, businesses, and platforms, while continuing to operate more profitably.”

Notably, Shapero’s memo made no mention of artificial intelligence being a driver for the cuts, unlike other tech giants going through their own layoffs. However, further memos from other LinkedIn executives identify AI integration in their workflow as a main motivator for trimming the workforce. 

“Our fastest moving teams are focused, have fewer layers, and leverage AI to move quickly,” wrote LinkedIn Ecosystem Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan in a separate staffwide memo on May 13. “The changes we’re making across our Product orgs are based on creating more agile teams in this model.”

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That would be consistent with parent company Microsoft’s current direction. In a staffwide memo last month, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood credited significant Q3 earnings, including a 123% bump in AI revenue, to “tighter, more accountable teams.”

In an unfortunate full-circle moment, employees who worked for years to build a site for people to more easily find work now find themselves active users for their own job searches. Affected employees have recently taken to their personal profiles to tap into their networks, share their disbelief and console co-workers whose jobs were also cut. Former employees affected by 2025 and 2023 layoffs also chimed in.

“It gets better. Take time to feel it all right now, but know that LinkedIn has given you wings to fly to the next opportunity!” one former employee wrote, offering another piece of advice in the same post: “Utilize LinkedIn Learning to build new skills.”

Work at LinkedIn or another Bay Area tech company and want to talk? Contact tech reporter Matthew Brown securely at [email protected] or on Signal at matthewbrownsfgate.11.