Uber cuts 3,300 jobs to fund its driverless future

Uber is laying off 3,300 people to pay for cars that do not need drivers.

The cut

CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told staff on September 2, 2026 that about 10% of the global workforce will go, the company’s biggest reduction since the pandemic. The restructuring flattens the organization: manager roles drop by 20%, with some managers moving into individual-contributor jobs, two-person teams are halved, and any position more than seven layers from the CEO disappears. He wrote that the company had become increasingly complex and that the savings will be reinvested in “the autonomous future.”

Where the money goes

Uber has already committed more than $10 billion to robotaxi partners including Avride, Lucid, Nuro and Rivian. It is still hiring for about 500 open roles, and almost all of them are engineering jobs tied to autonomous vehicles. The message to investors is that Uber does not plan to remain the company that pays drivers; it plans to be the dispatch layer for fleets that someone else builds, before Waymo and Tesla, which launched its Cybercab service in Austin the same week, settle that question for it.

Who is affected now, and who is next

The jobs cut this week are corporate staff, not drivers. That order matters. The first savings come from management layers, which are the easiest to explain to shareholders. The drivers, who are contractors rather than employees, are not on this list because they were never on the payroll; they leave the platform one city at a time as autonomous fleets arrive. The open question is how fast that second wave moves once the first one has paid for it.