Following news that Uber has laid off around 350 employees across a variety of teams, affecting Canada and the US, BetaKit has learned that the layoffs have not changed previously stated hiring targets for Uber Canada.
In September 2018, Uber announced plans to invest $200 million CAD over five years.
TechCrunch reported on Monday that, according to an email from Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi sent to employees and obtained by TechCrunch, the layoffs affected employees from Uber Eats, performance marketing, Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), recruiting, and global rides and platform department teams. Some employees were also apparently asked to relocate.
The most recent layoffs mark the third and, what Uber called, the final phase of layoffs since they began earlier this year (Uber laid off 435 and 400 employees, respectively, in previous phases). This is the first round of layoffs to directly affect Canadian Uber employees, as well as the first to hit Uber’s self-driving car arm, ATG.
A spokesperson for Uber Canada told BetaKit on Tuesday that the restructuring does not change the company’s plans to hire several hundred new employees as part of its $200 million Canadian expansion and plan to build an engineering hub in the city.
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In September 2018, Uber announced plans to invest $200 million CAD over five years. The engineering hub is set to accommodate more than 200 staff in the new building, with Uber setting its hiring target for more than 400 employees.
In January, the Toronto-based ATG office, which is led by University of Toronto professor Raquel Urtasun, sat at between 50 to 60 employees. The company stated plans at the time to double that headcount. The Uber Canada spokesperson confirmed to BetaKit that the restructuring did not affect those plans and that the ATG team had grown already within the year to more than 75 employees, with ongoing recruitment efforts still underway.
While Uber declined to offer comment on the number of Canadian employees affected, Techcrunch reported that more than 70 percent of those laid off were based in the US and Canada, with the rest evenly distributed across the globe. An Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch that, in total, the layoffs represent about percent of the company.