Samwise High Tech Recruiting Newsletter
Thursday, August 6, 2026
Etsy Cuts 12 Percent of Workforce in Restructuring Focused on Speed, Not Cost
Etsy announced Wednesday it is laying off approximately 220 employees—12 percent of its workforce—as part of a restructuring aimed at improving organizational coordination and accelerating decision-making. The cuts fall primarily on product and engineering divisions. In a shareholder letter released alongside Q2 earnings, CEO Kruti Patel Goyal said cost savings were “a consequence of these changes, but they are not the objective.” Etsy also clarified that artificial intelligence did not drive the cuts, distinguishing it from rivals that have recently cited AI automation as justification for workforce reductions. The restructuring is expected to be substantially complete by end of the third quarter.
Google Loses Chief Scientist Jeff Dean and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis in Major AI Leadership Shake-Up
Google’s AI division is undergoing a major leadership overhaul. Jeff Dean, the company’s chief scientist and a 27-year veteran, announced Wednesday he is leaving to co-found Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation focused on automating complex scientific and engineering research. Joining Dean are fellow Google AI researchers Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le. Alphabet will serve as a founding investor and cloud partner for the new startup. Simultaneously, Demis Hassabis is stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind to take on broader roles as the unit’s chairman and Alphabet’s chief scientist. Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s current chief technology officer, will assume leadership of the division as senior vice president.
Sources: CNBC, TechCrunch
ADP: Private Employers Added Just 44,000 Jobs in July as Hiring Cools Sharply
Private-sector hiring decelerated sharply in July, with U.S. employers adding just 44,000 workers—well below the 70,000 forecast and down from 98,000 in June—according to the ADP National Employment Report released Wednesday. The technology sector, captured in the information category, contributed 5,000 net new jobs. Services industries led growth, with education and health services adding 36,000 positions, while trade, transportation, and leisure and hospitality shed workers. On the compensation side, pay gains held steady at 4.4 percent annually for job-stayers, while workers who changed employers saw wages rise 7 percent year-over-year, the largest jump since August 2025, suggesting continued leverage for mobile tech professionals.
Meta Launches Muse Code AI Coding Agent to Compete With Anthropic and OpenAI
Meta Platforms launched Muse Code on Wednesday, its first AI coding agent designed to compete directly with tools from Anthropic and OpenAI. The terminal-based agent autonomously handles end-to-end software engineering tasks—planning code changes, writing implementations, and validating results across large codebases—by deploying fleets of parallel sub-agents for complex workloads. Meta said 7,000 engineers are already using the tool weekly internally, generating more than 800 fixes that improved model performance. The company is making Muse Code commercially available, priced at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens, with a lower-cost contributor tier. Meta requires internal engineering teams to adopt the tool.
Former Uber Finance Chief Gautam Gupta Joins Travis Kalanick’s Robotics Startup Atoms as CFO
Gautam Gupta, who served as Uber’s chief financial officer under Travis Kalanick, has joined Kalanick’s robotics startup Atoms as CFO, the company announced Wednesday. The appointment comes two weeks after Atoms closed a $1.7 billion funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, in which Uber itself invested $100 million. Gupta departed Uber in 2017 alongside Kalanick and joins a growing list of former Uber executives being recruited to Atoms. In his announcement, Gupta cited Kalanick’s leadership as the defining reason for the move. Atoms, focused on industrial AI applications across mining, food supply chains, and transportation, is assembling a roster of seasoned operators as it scales its robotics platform.
Sources: TechCrunch
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