Uber's decision to cut around 3,300 jobs came bundled with a second, more disruptive announcement for the roughly 29,000 employees staying on. Remote work is no longer the norm at the company. CEO Dara
Khosrowshahi's memo caps fully remote roles at about 1 percent of the workforce globally, effectively ending an arrangement that had built up over five years of hiring people regardless of where they lived.
Almost every remote employee is being told to relocate
The 1 percent figure is not a soft target but a hard ceiling that applies worldwide, and it marks a sharp reversal from Uber's post-pandemic hiring approach. Khosrowshahi tied the shift to what he said the company has learned since COVID-19 - that teams solve problems more effectively when they work in person. The memo, accessed by International Business Times, asks the vast majority of Uber's remote staff to move to an office near their team, turning what began as a layoff notice into a relocation mandate for a large share of the employees Uber is keeping.
Where employees live will now depend on what team they're on
Uber has laid out specific rules for where each category of team should be based. Global functions will sit in New York and San Francisco, regional teams will move to designated regional hubs, local teams to country-level hubs, and engineering staff to tech hubs. The company also wants managers co-located with their own teams wherever possible, and has flagged early-career employees as a group that should not be working in isolation. Uber has not disclosed which specific offices will see the deepest cuts, leaving employees in smaller locations uncertain about both their job security and whether their role, if it survives, will still be based where they currently live.
The three-day office rule will now be enforced
Uber's existing hybrid policy, which requires three days a week in the office, remains unchanged on paper but the company says it will actively push for compliance rather than leave it loosely applied. Combined with the hub consolidation, this ties attendance to a specific building rather than a general expectation, making the policy considerably harder to work around than a typical return-to-office push.
The restructuring behind the cuts
The layoffs themselves are aimed at flattening Uber's management structure. The company has reduced the number of employees sitting seven or more layers below the CEO by 20 percent and cut in half the number of teams with only one or two direct reports. Three separate delivery operations teams covering restaurants, retail and direct commerce are being merged, and within engineering, the Core Services Engineering and Science teams are being combined.
