Google lays off hundreds of ‘Core’ employees, moves some positions to India and Mexico
Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., during Stanford’s 2024 Business, Government, and Society forum in Stanford, California, US, on Wednesday, April 3, 2024.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Just ahead of its blowout first-quarter earnings report last week, Google laid off at least 200 employees from its “Core” teams, in a reorganization that will include moving some roles to India and Mexico, CNBC has learned.
Google’s Core unit is responsible for building the technical foundation behind the company’s flagship products and protecting users’ online safety, according to Google’s website. Core teams include key technical units from information technology, its Python developer team, technical infrastructure, security foundation, app platforms, core developers and various engineering roles.
At least 50 of the positions eliminated were in engineering at the company’s offices in Sunnyvale, California, filings show. Many of the Core teams will hire corresponding roles in Mexico and India, according to internal documents viewed by CNBC.
Asim Husain, vice president of Google Developer Ecosystem, announced some of the layoffs to his team in an email last week. He also spoke at a town hall and told employees that this was the biggest planned reduction for his team this year, an internal document shows.
“We intend to maintain our current global footprint while also expanding in high-growth global workforce locations so that we can operate closer to our partners and developer communities,” Husain wrote in the email.
Alphabet has been slashing headcount since early last year, when the company announced plans to eliminate about 12,000 jobs, or 6% of its workforce, following a downturn in the online ad market. Even with digital advertising rebounding in the past couple quarters, Alphabet has continued downsizing, with layoffs across multiple organizations this year.
CFO Ruth Porat announced in mid-April a restructuring to the company’s finance department, which included layoffs and moving positions to Bangalore and Mexico City. The company’s search boss, Prabhakar Raghavan, told employees at an all-hands meeting in March that Google plans to build teams closer to users in key markets, including India and Brazil, where labor is cheaper than in the U.S.
The latest cuts comes as the company enjoys its fastest growth rate since early 2022, alongside improving profit margins. Last week, Alphabet reported a 15% jump in first-quarter revenue from a year earlier, and announced its first-ever dividend and a $70 billion buyback.
“Announcements of this sort may leave many of you feeling uncertain or frustrated,” Husain wrote in the email to developers. He added that his message to developers is that the changes “are in service of our broader goals” as a company.
The teams involved in the reorganization have been key to the company’s developer tools, an area that’s being streamlined by Google as it incorporates more AI into the products. In February, Google announced a major rebrand of its chatbot from Bard to Gemini, the same name as the suit of AI models that power it.
Alphabet is gearing up for its annual developer conference, Google I/O, on May 14, where the company traditionally reveals new developer products and tools that have been underway during the prior year. Husain said in a memo explaining the developer changes that generative AI is at an “inflection point.”
“Recent advances in Generative AI across the industry, including Google’s Gemini, are changing the very nature of software development as we know it,” Husain wrote.
In a separate email, security engineering vice president Pankaj Rohatgi, told his team that, “In order to optimize for our business goals, we are expanding work to other locations, which will result in some role eliminations and proposed role eliminations.”
The Core layoffs also include the governance and protected data group, which will be at the center of regulatory challenges facing the company, particularly as lawmakers across the globe focus more on developments in AI. The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) went into effect in March, and is aimed at clamping down on anti-competitive practices in tech.
Evan Kotsovinos, Google’s vice president of governance and protected data, wrote about the upcoming changes in an email last week.
Kotsovinos said the team’s success means responding to “escalating regulatory focus” and is contingent on “moving faster.”
Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president overseeing search, recently referenced heightened competition, a more challenging regulatory environment and slower organic growth as the company’s “new operating reality.”
Google confirmed the Core reorganization and layoffs, and a spokesperson told CNBC that employees will be able to apply for open roles within Google and to access outplacement services.
“As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” the spokesperson said in an email. “A number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers and align their resources to their biggest product priorities.”
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Technology
Here are the SpaceX employees who were elected to run Musk’s new company town of Starbase, Texas
The SpaceX Starship sits on a launch pad at Starbase near Boca Chica, Texas, on October 12, 2024, ahead of the Starship Flight 5 test. The test will involve the return of Starship’s Super Heavy Booster to the launch site.
Sergio Flores | Afp | Getty Images
Over the weekend, Elon Musk got his new company town along the Texas Gulf Coast. Controlling the city are three SpaceX employees, who all ran unopposed.
As NBC News reported, the election determining incorporation of the city of Starbase concluded on Saturday night, with 212 votes in favor and only six against. Just 143 votes were needed for the measure to pass.
Starbase was victorious in becoming a type C city, which in Texas applies to a previously unincorporated city, town or village of between 201 and 4,999 inhabitants. The city includes the SpaceX launch facility and company-owned land covering a 1.6 square-mile area.
The mayor is 36-year-old Bobby Peden, who has spent more than 12 years working for SpaceX and is currently vice president for Texas test and launch operations. Prior to joining the rocket maker in 2013, Peden was a graduate research assistant at the University of Texas at Austin, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Starbase has two commissioners, both from the SpaceX employee ranks.
One is Jenna Petrzelka, 39, who was an operations engineering manager at SpaceX until July, and now identifies as a philanthropist, according to her application to be on the ballot. She’s married to Joe Petrzelka, a vice president of Starship engineering and almost 14-year veteran at SpaceX.
The other commissioner is Jordan Buss, 40, a senior director of environmental health and safety for SpaceX who joined the company in 2023.
Musk, who has assumed a central role in President Donald Trump’s administration responsible for slashing the size of the federal government, began acquiring land for SpaceX in Boca Chica, Texas, about a decade ago. The first integrated Starship vehicle launched from the site, known as Starbase, in April 2023, and exploded in mid-flight.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service soon disclosed details about the aftermath of the explosion, including that a “3.5-acre fire started south of the pad site on Boca Chica State Park land,” following the test flight.
State and federal regulators have fined SpaceX for violations of the Clean Water Act, and said the company had repeatedly polluted waters in the Boca Chica area. Environmental advocates and indigenous groups have also sued both the Federal Aviation Administration and SpaceX over the company’s flight tests and launch activity in the area.
Those groups said in legal filings that SpaceX caused harm to local habitat and endangered species due to vehicle traffic, noise, heat, explosions and fragmentation caused by the company’s construction, rocket testing and launch practices.
A SpaceX spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a post on X on Saturday, the account for StarbaseTX wrote, “Becoming a city will help us continue building the best community possible for the men and women building the future of humanity’s place in space.”
WATCH: SpaceX launches third test flight of massive Starship rocket
Hinge Health’s TrueMotion feature.
Courtesy: Hinge Health
Hinge Health on Monday updated its prospectus to include the results from its first quarter, which showed accelerating revenue growth over its fourth quarter.
The digital physical therapy startup filed to go public in March, but it has not shared a price range yet. Hinge said that revenue in its first quarter climbed 50% to $123.8 million, up from $82.7 million during the same period last year. Hinge reported $117.3 million in revenue during its fourth quarter, up 44% from the same period in 2023.
Hinge said its net income for the period was $17.1 million after taxes, up from a net loss of $26.5 million after taxes during the same period last year.
The company is attempting to go public at a time of extreme economic uncertainty and market volatility, spurred largely by President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff policy. Several companies, including online lender Klarna and ticket marketplace StubHub, have delayed their long-awaited IPOs.
Hinge’s updated prospectus signals to investors that the company is planning to forge ahead.
While the company’s revenue jumped 50%, the cost of goods sold fell slightly. That allowed Hinge to lift its gross margin to 81% from 70% a year earlier and record an operating income of $13.1 million after losing $31. 4 million in the same period a year earlier.
Hinge uses software to help patients treat acute musculoskeletal injuries, chronic pain and carry out post-surgery rehabilitation remotely. Large employers cover the costs so their employees can access Hinge’s app-based virtual physical therapy, as well as its wearable electrical nerve stimulation device called Enso.
Daniel Perez, Hinge’s CEO, and Gabriel Mecklenburg, the company’s executive chairman, co-founded the company in 2014 after experiencing personal struggles with physical rehabilitation.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Q1 2025 was the company’s first profitable quarter. Hinge was profitable previously.
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