Oracle is laying off 491 employees in Washington state, according to a filing submitted Tuesday to the state Employment Security Department, adding to a growing wave of technology sector job cuts hitting the Seattle region.
The reductions affect workers at two Seattle offices as well as remote employees and take effect 1 June. Oracle stated in its WARN letter that the offices will not be closing. The company declined to comment on the latest round of cuts.
The Washington layoffs are part of a broader company-wide reduction reported earlier this month by Bloomberg, which said Oracle was planning to cut thousands of jobs globally as it works to fund the high-cost deployment of new data centres. Oracle co-chief executive Mike Sicilia pointed to artificial intelligence as another driver of the reductions during a 10 March earnings call. “The use of AI coding tools inside Oracle is enabling smaller engineering teams to deliver more complete solutions to our customers more quickly,” Sicilia said.
The Washington cuts are concentrated heavily in software development, affecting more than 230 software developers across multiple seniority levels and an additional 48 employees carrying the title of software development. The reductions also reach into senior director and vice president roles, along with managers, product developers, product managers, programme managers, site reliability developers, technical analysts, and user experience developers.
The latest round follows previous Oracle layoffs of 161 workers in August and 101 in October. By last autumn, Oracle employed approximately 3,800 people in the Seattle area. The company has steadily built its regional presence over the past decade, drawing on the area’s engineering talent as it competed with Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud market, and has since established partnerships with both Seattle-area giants.
The Oracle cuts land as the Seattle technology sector absorbs layoffs from multiple directions simultaneously. Meta recently cut 168 Washington workers and T-Mobile confirmed a new round of layoffs last Friday, continuing a pattern of reductions that has reshaped the region’s tech employment landscape over the past year.
