Amazon Laying Off Hundreds of Seattle Jobs

Amazon is laying off employees in the "low hundreds" as an effort to shift head count allocation to businesses that are growing.

The company is cutting hundreds of jobs at its headquarters in Seattle, paring back older departments focused on selling goods online while hiring in newer lines of business like cloud computing and its Alexa platform.

The reductions are part of a broader reorganization at the company, but some see the moves as a shift toward using more robots and computers for functions once performed by humans.

“As part of our annual planning process, we are making head count adjustments across the company — small reductions in a couple of places and aggressive hiring in many others,” a spokesman said. “For affected employees, we work to find roles in the areas where we are hiring.”

Some employees have already been informed of the dismissal of their roles, and layoffs are expected to be completed in the next few weeks, one of the people said.

The reduction in positions is modest for Amazon, which counted 566,000 total employees at the end of 2017, up 66 percent from the previous year due largely to its acquisition of Whole Foods. Amazon has 3,900 corporate jobs open in Seattle, part of 12,000 such positions open worldwide, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Amazon has been expanding in e-commerce categories such as groceries, fashion and furniture while also building its cloud-computing division Amazon Web Services and finding new uses for its voice-activated Alexa service.

Amazon said last year that it planned to create 100,000 jobs in the U.S. as it bulks up fulfillment centers and adds more customer service representatives. The company is also in the process of choosing a city for its second headquarters, dubbed HQ2, where it plans to create 50,000 jobs in the next 10 to 15 years.

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