Uber Cuts 23% of People Division in New President's First Major Move

The Uber layoffs hitting HR and recruiting

Uber is cutting 23% of its People and Places division, the internal team responsible for human resources, recruiting, workplace facilities, and company culture. The announcement came June 3, 2026, relayed through internal memos obtained by Bloomberg and CNBC.

A company spokesperson confirmed the affected roles are mostly senior positions. The cuts represent well under 1% of Uber's total corporate headcount of 34,000 employees globally. Uber's approximately 10 million drivers are classified separately as independent contractors and are not included in this reduction.

Beyond the job cuts, HR employees who had previously been approved to work remotely are now being required to comply with Uber's three-day-a-week office mandate, which went into effect in June 2025. The same policy triggered internal backlash when it was first announced, with CEO Dara Khosrowshahi reportedly responding that employees who prioritized remote work should seek employment elsewhere.

Hazelbaker's mandate, three weeks in

Source: Uber

The restructuring is being driven by Jill Hazelbaker, who was promoted on May 11, 2026 to president and chief corporate affairs officer. The expanded role added safety operations and the People and Places organization to her existing oversight of marketing, communications, and public policy - making her one of the most powerful executives inside Uber's leadership structure.

In an internal memo to affected teams, Hazelbaker framed the cuts as a structural fix. 'As we've grown, parts of the organization have become too complex and fragmented, with overlapping responsibilities, unclear ownership, and teams operating too far from the businesses and partners they support,' she wrote. The goal, she said, is to build a 'more connected, modern, operationally excellent organization.'

CEO Dara Khosrowshahi separately messaged company leaders, calling the changes 'necessary to maximize the effectiveness of the People team and the enormous potential ahead of us.' The pace of these cuts - announced less than a month after Hazelbaker took the expanded role - signals that this is an executive with a clear directive to simplify, not consolidate.

The AI question Uber wants to sidestep

Uber has been careful to distance these cuts from artificial intelligence. A spokesperson told Bloomberg the reductions are unrelated to AI initiatives. That distinction matters, because most of the tech layoffs 2026 has produced have been justified openly under the banner of AI-driven efficiency. Uber is framing this as a structural reorganization, not automation.

The broader context is harder to ignore. Uber's tech chief reportedly told staff the company exceeded its entire 2026 AI budget within just four months. Last month, Uber also announced it would slow external hiring due to the productivity gains from internal AI tool adoption. The company still has more than 800 open roles, including positions tied to its robotaxi commercialization push through partnerships with companies like Waymo and Motional.

Whether or not AI directly caused these specific cuts, the reality is that the functions inside a People and Places division - onboarding, benefits administration, policy documentation, scheduling, cultural programming - are precisely the kind of structured, process-heavy workflows that AI job cuts and automation are gradually eliminating or compressing across large US companies. Uber may not be replacing people with software today. The conditions for doing so are clearly being built.

What the pattern looks like for US tech

The Uber layoffs in the People division are small in absolute terms, but the shape of them is meaningful. The pattern emerging across the tech industry is targeted reductions in back-office and administrative roles - HR, finance operations, legal support, internal comms - while engineering, product, and AI-focused headcount holds or grows.

These are not Uber's first cuts to this function. Earlier rounds of Uber layoffs in 2023 also targeted the recruiting team specifically. This time, the restructuring lands under a new president with a broader operational mandate, which means it is less likely to be an isolated event and more likely to be the start of a sustained simplification effort.

UBER shares have fallen roughly 14% so far in 2026, underperforming the S&P 500 over the past 12 months. On the day the People division cuts were announced, shares slipped about 0.6% to $71.21 before recovering some ground. Despite the stock underperformance, the company's Q1 2026 financials were strong - gross bookings grew 25% year-over-year to $53.7 billion, and income from operations reached $1.92 billion, up from $1.23 billion a year prior.

For US enterprise teams, HR leaders, and anyone watching how major platform companies are structuring themselves for the AI era, this is a story worth following. The question is not whether Uber is replacing people with software right now - they say it is not. The more important question is what the function of a corporate People team looks like inside a company that has already exceeded its AI budget four months into the year.

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