Amazon job cuts hit staffers in grocery, robotics, payments, AWS divisions

Amazon announced job cuts of around 18,000 employees last month, and those who lost their jobs were from various divisions of the company, including AWS, healthcare, payments, real estate and delivery business, among others, the media reported.

According to CNBC, an employee developed a spreadsheet after the layoff announcement, encouraging those affected to submit their information for recruiters’ use.

As per Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filings, at least 2,300 employees were laid off in Amazon’s home state of Washington.

Moreover, the filings show that over 500 took place in California, including engineering and recruiting divisions, while approximately 300 were in New York, said the report.

Among grocery and physical stores, there were job cuts of people employed as program managers, store designers, supply chain managers and software engineers, also Amazon Go and Go Grocery cashier-less convenience stores and supermarkets were also hit with layoffs.

In Amazon Robotics, hardware development engineers, mechatronics engineers, network engineers, applied science managers, and technical product managers were part of the job cuts, the report mentioned.

In its cloud computing division “AWS” (Amazon Web Services), those who lost their jobs had titles of software development engineer, senior program manager, account representative, cloud architect and quality assurance engineer.

Further, layoffs were also made in the company’s payments organisation, which oversees units such as the online payment processing service Amazon Pay.

Among those laid off were engineers, product managers, and employees working on the company’s Venmo checkout integration.

The report further mentioned that the cuts also included employees working on Amazon’s various healthcare offerings.

As part of the job cuts, Amazon Pharmacy, the online pharmacy it launched in 2020, lost program managers, risk compliance managers, and billing managers.

Employees working on digital health tools and the Halo health and fitness tracker were also laid off.

Amazon’s drone delivery unit saw widespread layoffs, with employees laid off in Washington, Oregon, Texas, and California.

Employees from the design, maintenance, systems engineering, flight testing, and flight operations units were among those laid off, according to the report, citing sources.

Other divisions that saw layoffs were Marketplace, Retail, Real Estate, Operations, and Zappos (Online shoe seller).