Hey,
You know what’s weirder than a company laying off people during a bad quarter? A company laying off people during a record quarter. This week, Cloudflare — profitable, growing, beating earnings — announced it was cutting 1,100 employees because, in its own words, AI had made their roles obsolete. Meanwhile, GM fired hundreds of IT workers and immediately posted 80 open AI jobs. ZoomInfo beat expectations and eliminated 20% of its workforce. Nobody’s cutting because they’re in trouble. They’re cutting because they’re deciding what they don’t need anymore.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York dropped a timely reality check on Thursday — and what they found might surprise you.
Today: Cloudflare’s record-revenue layoff, what the NY Fed just found out about AI and jobs, and five remote teams still actively building.
In This Issue:
- 🔥 The Big Story: Cloudflare sets a new precedent — thriving companies cut to transform, not survive
- ⚡ Quick Hits: 4 major workforce moves from ZoomInfo, GitLab, GM, and BioNTech
- 🏢 Companies Hiring: 5 remote-first teams with open roles right now
- 🎯 Career Signal: 40% of U.S. workers have zero AI exposure — NY Fed’s data just upended the panic
- ✅ Quick Win: One move that tells you exactly how exposed your role really is
🔥 The Big Story
Cloudflare Cuts 1,100 Workers With Record Revenue in the Bank
The headline. On May 7, Cloudflare co-founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn published a blog post announcing the elimination of 1,100 jobs — roughly 20% of the company’s 5,156-person workforce. Reductions will span most departments and global regions. Every affected employee receives full base pay through the end of 2026, continued healthcare coverage, and equity vesting through August 15. Workers who hadn’t hit their one-year cliff will have it waived and receive prorated equity. The reason given in the official post: Cloudflare’s internal AI usage had grown more than 600% in the prior three months, with employees across departments running thousands of AI agent sessions daily — doing work that, per the company, “used to require additional headcount.”
The bigger picture. Cloudflare isn’t cutting because it’s struggling. Q1 2026 revenue came in above analyst forecasts — the company is on an upward trajectory. What makes this week’s announcement different is the explicit framing: AI didn’t replace failing processes. It replaced working ones, operated by employees who were doing their jobs well. The roles eliminated weren’t redundant going in — they became redundant because AI made the same work faster and cheaper to run with fewer people. Cloudflare’s stock dropped more than 20% on the day of the announcement, suggesting markets weren’t fully pricing in how broadly this model might spread.
Why this matters: For the first time, a growing, profitable company said the quiet part out loud: you don’t have to underperform to become eligible for an AI-driven exit. If your output can be automated — not improved, not augmented, but fully replicated — the question of whether your company is doing well is now secondary to the question of whether your role needs to exist at all. That’s the new calculus job seekers need to be asking about their own positions.
Source: Cloudflare Engineering Blog — Building for the Future
Stat of the Week
115,000 → U.S. nonfarm payroll jobs added in April 2026, with healthcare (+37,000), retail (+22,000), and transportation leading gains. Average hourly earnings grew 3.6% year-over-year to $37.41 — and unemployment held at 4.3% for the third straight month. (BLS Employment Situation, May 8, 2026)
⚡ Quick Hits
ZoomInfo Cuts 600 — That’s 20% of Its Workforce — After a Quarter Where It Beat Estimates
The pattern is becoming a theme. On May 11, ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck sent an email to employees confirming the company’s 2026 Restructuring Program — a global reduction of approximately 600 employees, or about 20% of its first-quarter ending headcount. The company’s board approved the plan on May 5. Roughly one-fourth of the impacted roles will be reallocated or offset by new hires in different locations. The program is expected to be substantially complete by year-end, with pre-tax charges of $45M to $60M — most of them cash. The company beat revenue expectations in Q1. Profitable enough to cut, too efficient to keep the same headcount around. See the 8-K filing →
GitLab Is Flattening Its Organization and Exiting Nearly a Third of Its Countries
GitLab — the company built from day one on the premise that great work can happen anywhere — announced “Act 2” on May 11: a major restructuring that includes job cuts, flattening up to three management layers in some functions, and exiting approximately 30% of the countries where it currently operates. The company had 2,580 employees as of January, and affected employees can apply for voluntary separation through May 18. Full headcount and financial impact will be disclosed on the June 2 earnings call. CEO Bill Staples was explicit that this isn’t purely AI-driven: “This restructure process is not like others you may be seeing in the news.” But country exits at a fully-distributed company aren’t operational — they’re a signal that even remote-first organizations are now making geographic bets about where talent costs, infrastructure, and regulation make presence viable. Read the GitLab Act 2 announcement →
GM Fires 500–600 IT Workers, Then Immediately Posts 80 AI Jobs
General Motors cut approximately 500 to 600 salaried IT workers on May 11 — primarily in Austin, Texas and Warren, Michigan — as part of what the company described as a transformation of its Information Technology organization. At the same time, GM had roughly 80 open IT positions focused on AI-native development, data engineering, cloud infrastructure, and prompt engineering. The official GM statement: “We have made the difficult decision to eliminate certain roles globally… to better position the company for the future.” This isn’t a tech company doing this — it’s an automaker. General Motors makes cars. And it just decided that a meaningful portion of its tech headcount needs to be rebuilt around AI rather than evolved from within. Whatever industry you’re in right now, that logic is coming for it. See GM news →
BioNTech Is Cutting Up to 1,860 Positions as Vaccine Revenue Continues to Fall
BioNTech announced in its Q1 2026 earnings that it plans to exit manufacturing operations at sites in Idar-Oberstein, Marburg, and Singapore, along with CureVac’s former sites — affecting up to approximately 1,860 positions in total. Site exits in Germany are planned through the end of 2027; Singapore operations are expected to conclude in Q1 2027. BioNTech expects this to generate approximately €500 million in recurring annual savings once fully implemented by 2029. The driver isn’t AI — it’s the simple reality that COVID vaccine demand has structurally declined and the manufacturing capacity built for a 2021 world no longer maps to a 2026 business model. Worth watching: co-founders Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci are transitioning out of the company by the end of 2026 as BioNTech pushes toward becoming a multi-product oncology company. See BioNTech Q1 2026 results →
🏢 Companies Hiring Right Now
While restructuring dominates the headlines, these five remote-friendly teams are adding headcount — not cutting it.
HubSpot — Remote-First Across Marketing, Engineering, Sales, and Customer Success → More than 70% of HubSpot’s employees work remotely full-time. The company’s @home model treats remote as the primary experience, not an accommodation. Current openings span software engineering, product, sales, customer success, and support. View open roles at HubSpot →
Shopify — “Digital by Design,” Fully Remote Since 2020 → Shopify operates on a distributed model it calls “Digital by Design” — employees do their best work wherever that is, with optional access to Port offices for collaboration. Current positions span engineering, data, sales development, and business analysis. No geographic restrictions on most roles. View open roles at Shopify →
Zapier — 100% Remote, Mission-Driven Automation Platform → Zapier has been fully distributed since its founding and has no physical offices. Openings span product, engineering, customer success, and operations. View open roles at Zapier →
Duolingo — Remote-Friendly With 70+ Open Positions → Duolingo is actively hiring across engineering, research, design, and business roles, with remote options across many tracks. The company offers 20+ days PTO, a two-week winter break, and a fully-paid two-month sabbatical at 10 years. View open roles at Duolingo →
Figma — Design Platform Hiring Globally Across Engineering and GTM → Figma operates a hybrid-remote model with strong global hiring across product engineering, design, go-to-market, and customer success. View open roles at Figma →
Know someone between jobs? Forward this section — it might be exactly what they need.
🎯 Career Signal
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York published new research on May 14 examining whether AI’s impact on labor demand is showing up in job postings — and what they found cuts against the panic narrative. Fewer than 10% of U.S. workers are in occupations with AI exposure of 0.4 or higher. 40% of all U.S. workers are in jobs with zero measured AI exposure. The jobs most affected by AI substitution are concentrated in white-collar knowledge work — accounting, software, legal analysis, financial services, certain marketing roles. Service work, trades, logistics, healthcare, and education-adjacent roles have dramatically lower AI exposure scores. The disruption is real, but it’s not evenly distributed. Knowing which side of that line your occupation sits on is now one of the most strategically valuable things you can figure out before your next job search or pivot.
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of New York — Liberty Street Economics, May 14, 2026
🧠 Skill-Building Reads
Three resources worth your time this week.
Google AI Essentials — Free Certificate for Non-Engineers Who Want Real AI Fluency → Google’s AI Essentials course is a free, self-paced program that teaches practical AI use for professionals in any field. It covers prompting, using AI tools in workflows, evaluating AI outputs, and responsible use. If you’ve been putting off getting formal AI fluency because you’re not technical, this is the entry point. Read it →
Anthropic Research: “Labor Market Impacts of AI” — Which Jobs Are Actually at Risk? → Anthropic published a rigorous research paper in March 2026 measuring which job categories have meaningful AI substitution exposure and which don’t. The data is occupation-specific — not a general anxiety piece, but actual numbers broken down by role type. Before you assume your career is in the crosshairs (or safely insulated), spend 20 minutes with this data. Read it →
BCG: “AI Will Reshape More Jobs Than It Replaces” — A Framework for What Actually Happens → BCG’s 2026 research argues that the dominant pattern isn’t replacement — it’s role transformation: the same job title, with a materially different task mix. The research maps which task types are most susceptible to automation and which create durable human value even in AI-augmented environments. Read it →
✅ Quick Win
Before your next application session, map your own role against the Anthropic AI exposure data.
The Anthropic labor market research (linked above) breaks down which task categories carry the highest AI substitution risk. Spend 15 minutes identifying which of your core tasks fall into “document drafting,” “data synthesis,” or “routine process execution” — those carry above-average AI exposure. Then identify which parts of your work require judgment, context-switching, stakeholder management, or human relationships that AI can’t replicate yet. Write those down. That’s your moat, and it’s what your next resume and cover letter should lead with — not a list of your outputs, but a demonstration of your irreplaceable inputs.
What we’re watching: Whether Meta follows through on its planned May 20 round of additional layoffs; whether Cloudflare’s full-pay-through-year-end severance model becomes a benchmark that other profitable companies face pressure to match; and how many of the companies currently announcing “agentic AI pivots” are genuinely transforming versus using AI framing to execute routine cost cuts that would have happened regardless.
🎯 Bottom Line
What this week made clear is that the rules changed when nobody was looking. Cloudflare cut 20% of its workforce after a record-revenue quarter. ZoomInfo beat estimates and eliminated 600 roles. GM fired 500–600 IT workers and immediately started hiring their replacements with different skills. These aren’t distress signals — they’re transformation signals, and the distinction matters enormously for how you read the job market right now.
The question companies are asking isn’t “can we afford to keep these people?” It’s “does this role need to exist in its current form?” Those are very different questions, and the second one has a very different answer depending on whether your work can be replicated, automated, or restructured away. At the same time, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York just confirmed that 40% of U.S. workers have zero measured AI exposure — which means for a substantial portion of the workforce, this week’s headlines describe someone else’s problem, not theirs.
The companies still building — HubSpot, Shopify, Zapier, Duolingo, Figma — are hiring people whose skills align with where they’re going. RemoteHunter.com tracks verified remote roles at companies actively adding headcount, with AI tools to sharpen your resume and cover letter so your application reflects the future you’re aiming for — not just the role you’ve been in.
Until next week — keep building.
— The RH Team 🤙
p.s. know someone who’d love this? Forward this email or share it here.
What did you think of this week’s issue? [positive / neutral / negative]