Strategic HR

AWS job cuts: Managers, engineers, and recruiters impacted; CEO responds

As part of Amazon's recent layoff round of 9,000 employees, Amazon Web Services has laid off a range of employees, including partner marketing managers, enterprise account executives, engineers, and recruiters. These recently laid-off employees have taken to LinkedIn to inform their social network of the situation.

Barbara Rivero, a global senior partner marketing manager at AWS who had been working with the company for over five years, announced on LinkedIn that she had been affected by the recent AWS layoffs. “Unfortunately, today I was impacted by the AWS layoffs,” she wrote. 

After reviewing several LinkedIn posts from laid-off AWS employees, CRN reported that many of them were relatively new employees who had joined the company within the past few years. A number of technical recruiters who had joined AWS within the last 18 months also took to LinkedIn to announce that they had been laid off.

The laid-off employees comprise a variety of roles, ranging from software development engineers, cybersecurity consultants, and senior cloud architects, to senior and enterprise account executives, DevOps consultants, senior specialist solutions architects, software development engineers, and data scientist managers.

Tanner Pratt, who served as head of data streaming for AWS’ global professional services organisation, was among the employees laid off after spending two years with the cloud computing giant based in Seattle. 

In a LinkedIn post, Pratt expressed his gratitude for the opportunity to learn from and work with industry superstars, as well as help customers effectively use AWS as they modernised their data platforms. “Today I was laid off from AWS. It was an incredible ride to learn the inner workings of the mothership,” Pratt said.

Some other employees who were laid off included Robson Balista da Silva, AWS’ Latin America partner program manager; Shai Perednik, AWS’ global technology and segment leader for Web3 and blockchain; and Mallik Mudigonda, senior database consultant for AWS professional services.

“After working for almost 8 years in multiple teams at AWS, am now back on the market. Unfortunately, I am one of those affected by the recent round of 9,000 layoffs,” Mudigonda said on LinkedIn.

AWS recently confirmed to CRN that its parent company Amazon's latest round of layoff affecting 9,000 employees would impact a small percentage of AWS employees. However, the cloud market leader, which is worth $85 billion, did not disclose the exact number of employees who would be affected.

In January, Amazon announced a layoff of 18,000 employees, but it was reported that AWS would not be significantly affected. However, the recent round of layoffs by Amazon is impacting at least several hundred, if not a few thousand, AWS employees.

On Wednesday, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky addressed the decision to cut jobs within AWS in a memo to the company's employees. “I wanted to let you know that conversations with impacted AWS employees started today, with notification messages sent to all impacted employees in the US, Canada, and Costa Rica. It is a tough day across our organisation,” said Selipsky.

Selipsky noted that AWS has experienced significant growth in both its business and team in recent years, due to the increasing customer demand for cloud and the unique value proposition that AWS offers.

“Given this rapid growth, as well as the overall business and macroeconomic climate, it is critical that we focus on identifying and putting our resources behind our top priorities—those things that matter most to customers and that will move the needle for our business. In many cases this means team members are shifting the projects, initiatives or teams on which they work; however, in other cases it has resulted in these role eliminations,” said Selipsky. 

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