Amazon cuts around 1,000 jobs; India retail employees among those hit | Company News

The job cuts primarily affect Amazon’s Stores unit, which runs the company’s main ecommerce business, according to Reuters. The layoffs come as Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days shopping event is under way. The two-day sale began on Tuesday and offers discounts across several product categories.

Amazon cuts around 1,000 jobs

Amazon confirmed that it had eliminated around 1,000 roles, mainly within its Stores division. “We’ve adjusted parts of our Stores business because we believe this structure will better enable us to deliver on our priorities,” a spokesperson said, reported Reuters.

The changes have affected several parts of the Stores organisation, including customer service and selling partner services, according to internal Slack posts reviewed by Reuters. Employees in India, the US and the UK were among those who received notices about the layoffs.

The latest cuts are part of a series of smaller job reductions that have followed a larger round of more than 30,000 layoffs that began last year and continued into January.

Bezos says Amazon had overhired during pandemic

Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos said the company’s earlier job cuts were partly linked to the increase in hiring during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In a Fox News interview aired on Wednesday, Bezos was asked about the 30,000 jobs eliminated in the previous round of layoffs.

“People were staying home and they were ordering, and it was an incredible, stressful period for us, by the way,” he said. “The whole team worked extremely hard and did so much, but we really grew our head count.”

The latest layoffs come even as Amazon plans to increase spending on artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure.

Amazon is preparing to spend a record $220 billion on data centres, chips and other infrastructure to support AI and related operations.

Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy has said the spending would “predominantly” be directed towards Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s cloud computing business. Most of that investment is expected to support AI workloads.

Amazon reaches out to former employees for AI roles

Amazon has also been approaching former employees, including some who were laid off, for roles in AI, machine learning and cloud computing, according to a Business Insider report.

Recruiter emails reviewed by Business Insider showed that Amazon’s AI agent organisation, overseen by AWS Vice-President Swami Sivasubramanian, contacted former employees in August about openings in AI and machine learning. One recruiter described the effort as “Swami’s Boomerang Reengagement Initiative”, the news report said.

In another case, an AWS Finance recruiter contacted a former employee and offered an expedited interview process that could potentially lead to a job offer.

“A lot has changed since you were here, and there’s some really compelling work happening across AI/ML right now,” one email accessed by Business Insider read.

Amazon told Business Insider that rehiring former employees is a longstanding companywide practice. Company spokeswoman Haley Silva said former employees, including those who had been laid off, could be considered for open positions depending on current hiring needs. She said the outreach was not specifically aimed at employees who had left because of Amazon’s return-to-office policy.