Uber Cuts 3,300 Jobs to Remove Management Layers as Robotaxi Competition Grows

Uber is laying off about 3,300 people, roughly 10% of its global workforce, to remove management layers and put more money into ride-hailing, delivery and robotaxis. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced the cuts in an internal email on Sept. 2, TechCrunch reported. Bloomberg first reported the layoffs.

“We’ve built new products, expanded into new businesses, reached more consumers and supported more earners, and become a much larger and stronger company,” Khosrowshahi wrote. “But that growth has also brought complexity: 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.”

What’s changing

The restructuring cuts the number of managers by 20%, and some managers will become individual contributors. Uber will also:

• Cut the number of teams with only one or two members by nearly half
• Reduce by 20% the number of employees sitting seven or more reporting layers below the CEO
• Combine its engineering, science and delivery divisions, and merge delivery operations across restaurants, retail and direct
• Concentrate staff in key hubs and limit fully remote roles to about 1% of employees, while keeping its three-day office policy

“A leaner organization will mean clearer ownership, faster decisions, and more time spent building rather than coordinating. It will also generate savings that we intend to reinvest in growth, innovation, and the capabilities that will matter most over the coming years,” Khosrowshahi said, according to Reuters, via the New York Post.

These are Uber’s biggest cuts since May 2020, when it shed 6,700 jobs during the pandemic. The company had about 34,000 employees at the end of 2025, according to its annual report. Unlike several other tech CEOs, Khosrowshahi didn’t blame the cuts on AI. Reuters noted, though, that Uber employees reportedly used up the company’s entire 2026 AI budget in four months.

The robotaxi pressure

Uber shares rose nearly 1% on the news. Reuters said the stock was down close to 8% for the year, behind both the S&P 500 and Lyft, on worries about competition. Waymo runs its cars through Uber’s app in Austin and Atlanta but has been expanding into other markets without Uber, and Tesla is pushing its own robotaxi service. Investors worry that driverless fleets could cut out Uber’s role as the middleman. Uber plans to put more than $10 billion into robotaxis over the coming years, backing companies that develop autonomous driving systems.

“As AV tech and relationships grow and expand – there is a different type of employee needed to scale that business than one built around human drivers and all the cost to serve entailed with that, including management layers,” said Adam Ballantyne, an analyst at Uber shareholder Cambiar Investors.