Amazon lays off hundreds at its IT centers in Romania amid global restructuring

US tech giant Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) laid off 464 employees at its software development centers in Romania in 2023, according to official data reported by its local subsidiary Amazon Development Center SRL to the Finance Ministry. The cuts represented over 10% of the company’s local workforce. Even after the layoffs in 2023, Amazon remains one of the biggest tech employers in Romania, with over 3,700 local employees.

The downsizing of Amazon’s Romanian development centers came amid significant workforce restructuring reported by major international tech companies in 2023. Starting in 2022 and throughout 2023, Amazon laid off 27,000 employees. In January 2024, the group announced further job cuts at its Prime Video, MGM Studios, and Twitch units, according to CNBC.

Rumors about layoffs carried out by big international tech companies in Romania have been circulating in the market since early 2023, but the financial report filed by Amazon Development Center SRL is the first official confirmation in this sense.

Iasi-based Amazon Development Center SRL reported an average number of 3,770 employees for 2023, down from 4,234 in 2022.

Amazon opened its Development Center in Iasi – the company’s first R&D site in Eastern Europe – in 2005. The technology teams in Iasi have been part of Amazon’s innovation efforts across a broad range of areas, including product safety, compliance, cloud computing, machine learning, and information security.

In 2017, Amazon opened another development center in Bucharest, home to Speech and Language Solutions for Alexa, Alexa Product Testing, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) teams working on key technologies for the Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) service.

In June 2023, the company inaugurated its third local office in Timisoara, hosting Ring, Product Safety & Compliance, Global Solutions & Risk Compliance teams.

In April 2024, Amazon consolidated its presence in Iasi through the opening of a new 4,500 sqm office in the Palas Campus, an event attended by Romanian Prime Minister Nicolae Ciucă, U.S. Ambassador to Romania Kathleen Ann Kavalec, and Amazon top executives.

The layoffs reported by Amazon in Romania in 2023 came after a rapid expansion of the group’s local operations in the previous years. Between 2017 and 2022, Amazon added almost 3,400 employees to its Romanian development centers while the turnover of its local subsidiary went up from EUR 33 mln to EUR 125 mln, official data shows.