Uber is cutting about 3,300 jobs, roughly 10% of its global workforce, in its largest restructuring since the 2020 pandemic layoffs. The move, announced internally on September 2, 2026, aims to flatten management, simplify teams, tighten office requirements, and free capital for core rides, delivery, and a major push into robotaxis.
CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told employees the company had grown rapidly over more than five years, its top line nearly tripling, but that growth produced “more layers, more coordination, more fragmented ownership, and in some cases structures that made sense when businesses were smaller but no longer serve us well at our current scale.” The goal, he said, is a “simpler and faster” organization with clearer ownership and more time spent building rather than aligning.
What is changing
Affected employees were notified immediately, except where local labor rules require a longer process. The cuts hit both managers and individual contributors and are described as broadly proportional across seniority levels. Uber said it would reduce the number of managers by 20%, with some shifting into individual-contributor roles rather than leaving.
Organizational changes include:
- Cutting “micro-teams” (managers with only one or two direct reports) by nearly half.
- Reducing the number of employees sitting seven or more layers below the CEO by 20%.
- Combining three Delivery operations groups (restaurants, retail, and direct/white-label) into single-threaded teams with unified P&Ls.
- Merging core services engineering and science teams to match the structure already used in Mobility and Delivery.
Uber is also concentrating staff in fewer hubs: global teams in New York and San Francisco, plus designated regional, country, and tech hubs. It will prioritize co-locating managers with their teams, especially earlier-career employees. Fully remote roles will shrink to about 1% of the workforce; the company will continue requiring three days a week in the office under its hybrid policy.
After the reductions, headcount is expected to fall toward the low 30,000s, closer to 2021 levels. Uber reported roughly 34,000 employees at the end of 2025 and about 36,600 as of mid-2026 in some filings.
Uber’s Robotaxis Era
Uber has pledged more than $10 billion over the coming years toward autonomous vehicles, a mix of equity stakes in partners and support for fleets, with an ambition to operate as the leading commercialization platform for robotaxis and to deploy on the order of 120,000 vehicles. Partnerships include Waymo, Wayve, Lucid, Rivian, Nuro, Baidu, and others. The company has talked about launching or expanding services in at least 15 cities this year.
Competition is intensifying. Waymo and others are expanding independently, Tesla is pushing its own robotaxi plans, and delivery faces pressure from rivals and the need for scale. Shares had fallen about 7–8% year to date before the layoff news; they rose roughly 1.5–2% after the announcement as investors welcomed the streamlining.
The 2020 pandemic cuts of about 6,700 jobs were a response to a collapse in demand. This round is presented as a deliberate reset after years of expansion: fewer layers, fewer tiny teams, more people in designated offices, and more capital pointed at rides, delivery, and autonomy. Whether a leaner org chart actually speeds decisions and funds a durable AV advantage will be the test over the next several years.
