The company is also asking almost all remote employees to move to an office.
Uber is restructuring its organization, which includes laying off around 10 percent of its employees. As CNBC notes, it had a headcount of about 34,000 as of the end of 2025. The company has already notified affected workers, except those in locations where it has to follow other processes.
In a memo to staff, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said Uber is simplifying its teams and removing management layers in service of becoming “simpler and faster” while giving it more bandwidth to make investments. “A leaner organization will mean clearer ownership, faster decisions and more time spent building rather than coordinating,” Khosrowshahi wrote. “It will also generate savings that we intend to reinvest in growth, innovation and the capabilities that will matter most over the coming years.” Of note, the company last month pledged to invest $10 billion in getting back into autonomous vehicles — it sold its previous self-driving division in 2020.
Khosrowshahi said “Uber has grown by orders of magnitude, with our top line nearly tripling” over the last five years or so. The growth has added more complexity to the company, he noted, with employees suggesting in surveys they spend too much time on discussing issues and coordinating across teams. To address that, the company has cut many roles that focused on coordination, reduced the number of management layers and merged teams “where fragmentation was creating duplication and slowing decisions.” The result of this, according to Khosrowshahi, “is a simpler org chart geared toward building versus managing.”
Uber is also concentrating more of its teams in a smaller number of key locations. Its global teams will be based in New York and San Francisco, and it will still have tech hubs as well as regional and country-based teams. In addition, it is “asking the vast majority of remote employees to move to an office” and enforcing its hybrid work policy that requires employees to spend three days a week in the office. Khosrowshahi said that only around one percent of Uber employees will be working remotely in the future. “The benefits of sitting together, collaborating in person and solving problems as a team are clearer than ever in our post-COVID world,” he claimed.
“I realize this is a lot of change, but we decided it was better to make one big shift rather than multiple small ones,” Khosrowshahi added. “We have tremendous momentum, significant financial capacity and opportunities in front of us that are larger than at any point since I joined the company. The decisions we’re making today are difficult, but they will help us build an even stronger Uber for the years ahead.”
