Uber has announced a 10% reduction in its global workforce
as it looks to simplify structures.
CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a company memo that Uber is “refining
our global location strategy and focusing our people and investments against the
biggest opportunities ahead of us.”
He added that everyone affected by the job cuts had been
informed except in countries where local processes need to be followed.
Earlier this year the company laid out an ambition to become
the largest facilitator of autonomous vehicle trips in its fourth quarter 2025
earnings call and Khosrowshahi said Uber was on a “clear path” to achieve that
goal.
Coinciding with the job cuts announcement, the first robotaxis
from the company’s partnership with Wayve hit the streets of London on Thursday.
The CEO went on to lay out why the cuts were being made now
given the companies growth in the past couple of years. In 2025, Uber reported
a 20% increase in annual gross bookings growth for the fifth consecutive year.
“Very few companies are able to generate this much growth at this scale,
and we’re proud of the execution and innovation that has gotten us to this
point,” he said at the time. “Yet despite our size, we are still in the early
stages of customer acquisition, which continues to be the primary contributor
to our growth.”
In the memo Khosrowshahi said that the growth had also
introduced complexity with “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.”
He added that the changes would make Uber “simpler and
faster” as well as generated savings to reinvest.
Part of the reorganization has meant reducing the number of employees
who are seven or more layers from the CEO by 20% and the number of micro-teams
of one or two reports by nearly 50%.
Uber is also concentrating global teams in its New York and
San Francisco global hubs and regional teams in regional hubs and asking most
remote employees to move to an office.
In Q2 2026 earnings Uber announced gross bookings up 24% to $58 billion, revenue up 12% to $14.2 billion and adjusted EBITDA up 33% to $2.8 billion.