Amazon has spent the past six months cutting more than 30,000 corporate jobs—14,000 in October and 16,000 in January in its two biggest rounds of layoffs, with smaller cuts trickling through in between—and has simultaneously poured nearly $100 billion into AI infrastructure. So when AWS CEO Matt Garman took the stage at Amazon’s “What’s Next with AWS” event this week and said demand for software engineers is actually accelerating, it was worth paying attention to. Amazon, he said, plans to bring on 11,000 software development engineer interns and early-career full-time hires globally in 2026—a number the company says is consistent with previous years.“I can tell you we are hiring just as many software developers as we ever had inside of Amazon,” Garman said. “And in fact, I see the demand for that really accelerating.”
Amazon’s AI push hasn’t killed the developer job, but it’s reshaping it
Garman was careful not to paint an unchanged picture of what being a software engineer at Amazon looks like going forward. The role, he said, is shifting. Writing Java code snippets on demand will matter less. Building end-to-end applications, understanding what customers actually need, and working fluently with cloud services will matter more.“The jobs will be a little bit different,” he said. “Being an expert at being able to author a Java code snippet is going to be less valuable in the future than it was maybe a couple of years ago.”It’s a notable posture for Garman, who has previously pushed back hard against doomsday framings of AI’s impact on tech jobs. Last August, he called the idea of replacing junior employees with AI “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.” His tone this week was more measured—acknowledging real change while resisting the narrative that engineering as a profession is on its way out.
Others in tech aren’t as optimistic
Not everyone in the industry agrees. Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, said in February that the title “software engineer” could eventually “go away” entirely as AI takes over more of the actual coding work. Andreessen Horowitz partner Martin Casado has gone further, saying software engineering is being “disrupted as a discipline.” These aren’t fringe takes—they’re coming from people building the tools that Garman’s engineers now use daily.Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was also candid in a June 2025 note to employees: AI would reduce the company’s total corporate headcount over the next few years, primarily through attrition rather than mass layoffs. The 30,000 cuts that followed—framed officially as a restructuring to reduce management layers and bureaucracy—played out largely as Jassy described.What Garman is arguing, then, is something more nuanced than “AI won’t affect jobs.” His point is that Amazon still needs engineers—a lot of them—just not engineers whose core value is syntax fluency. Whether the next generation of developers sees that as an opportunity or a warning will likely depend on how fast those tools improve.
