TL; DR
Cloudflare’s engineering team grew 45% even after mass layoffs, as CEO Prince says AI is killing “scale” roles while developers and vendors survive.
Cloudflare’s engineering workforce has grown by 45 percentIn the weeks after t company 1100 jobs were cut in MayAccording to BNP Paribas data taken from LinkedIn profiles. The finding, first reported by Business Insider , shows that Cloudflare’s engineering staff grew from 1,308 to 1,894, even as its overall workforce fell by a fifth. CEO Matthew Prince confirmed the trend and offered a framework for understanding it: according to him, every company is made up of builders, sellers and measurers, and AI eliminates the third group.
The difference is simple, Prince told Business Insider. Builders build products, salespeople generate revenue, and surveyors track, report, and coordinate the work of the first two groups. The roles being cut at Cloudflare and across the tech industry largely fall into the gauge category: middle managers, operations staff, financial analysts and marketing coordinators who can now anticipate the work of AI agents.
“What you think AI is most effective at is looking at data sets and summarizing them.” Prince said. He added that if his engineers are more productive with AI, he will hire more of them, not fewer. The logic is that AI increases the productivity of the people who build and sell it, but replaces those whose primary function is monitoring and reporting.
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The BNP Paribas analysis reviewed and approved by Business Insider Prince could not be independently verified outside of this report. LinkedIn profile data records job title changes and may not perfectly reflect the number of internal employees. But the direction is consistent with Prince’s stated strategy: Cloudflare cut big and then invested heavily in the functionality it deemed most valuable.
The pattern is not unique to Cloudflare. TrueUp, a platform that tracks tech recruitment, reports that open technology roles are up 14 percent in 2026 and hardware engineering positions are up 52 percent from a year ago. Gains were concentrated in technical and product roles, while openings in operations, human resources and general management declined.
Companies hire more people who build things and fewer people who manage people who build things. GitLab followed a similar playbook in Maycut seven percent of its workforce, eliminating up to three levels of management while reorganizing the engineering division into 60 autonomous teams. Chief executive Bill Staples called it a “preparation.”agent cycle,” and the companies that are cutting most aggressively aren’t reducing their engineering capabilities, they’re concentrating them.
Prince’s framework provides an implicit warning for anyone whose job description is based on coordination, reporting, or process management. He told Business Insider that he was open about the trajectory.many support roles will not be roles that drive companies forward.“If your job can be described as measuring what other people produce, the category you occupy is the first category AI targets.
Broader labor market data complicates the picture somewhat. Tech CEOs have recently moved from warning about AI job losses to insisting AI will create jobsA twist that coincides with impending IPOs for companies including OpenAI and Anthropic. Prince’s framework sits somewhere between the two narratives: he doesn’t claim that AI is creating jobs as a whole, but that it is specifically creating engineering jobs at the expense of everyone else.
It’s an open question whether the builders-vendors-meters model is beyond Cloudflare. Not every measurement role is indispensable, and not every company can accommodate a 45 percent engineering expansion while cutting a fifth of its total workforce. The framework also assumes that AI tools are reliable enough to replace human judgment in control functions, an assumption that remains controversial even among AI researchers.
What is not in dispute is the direction of recruitment. Cloudflare’s Q1 2026 revenue rose 34 percent year-over-year to $640 million, and the company added a record number of enterprise customers even as it shed 1,100 roles. The restructuring was driven not by financial weakness, but by a bet that what those people were doing could now be done in software, and that the savings would be better spent on engineers writing more.
Prince’s taxonomy names the change that dozens of companies are implementing simultaneously, but rarely describes it clearly. The question for the tens of thousands of workers displaced in the tech sector this year is, “gauge” is a temporary label applied to roles that will eventually return, or a permanent sentence for an entire job category.
