Google is laying off around 52 employees in Washington state, according to a WARN notice it filed on Wednesday and first reported by GeekWire. The letter gives no reason for the cuts. It says only that they are permanent, and that they are not the result of relocating or contracting work out of the state.

The roles sit across the company’s core engineering work. They include software engineers, engineering and product managers, mechatronics engineers, UX designers, and recruiters. The affected staff are spread across seven buildings in Kirkland, Redmond, and Seattle, with three more working remotely. Notifications began on 8 July, and the separations run from early September to 4 October.

A first since 2023

It is Google’s first significant reduction in the state since 2023. In January that year, parent company Alphabet shed 12,000 workers globally, or 6% of its workforce. It did not break out how many were in Washington.

Washington is one of Google’s largest engineering hubs outside its California headquarters. It opened offices in the state more than 20 years ago, working on Android, Chrome, Cloud, Maps, and Ads. The company also cut jobs in its Google Cloud division earlier this summer, including on cybersecurity teams, Business Insider reported, without giving a number.

Both ends of the company, one week

The timing is what makes the filing worth reading. The cuts land in the same week Google lost four of its most senior researchers. Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals all left to found startups, and two of them are launching a venture fund on the side.

At the top, Google is losing the people who built its AI. At the bottom, it is filing WARN notices on the engineers who ship its products. Both happened in the same seven days.

Money is not the constraint. Google is guiding to up to $205bn in capital spending this year, most of it on AI infrastructure. Set against that, 52 salaries barely register. The filing signals where the company no longer wants headcount, not whether it can pay for it.

The wider Washington cull

Google is not alone. Zillow disclosed this week that it is cutting 91 jobs in the state, weighted towards senior staff, part of its largest round of the year. Microsoft and Amazon have each cut Washington employees in multiple rounds over the past 12 months.

Earlier this year, Google staff rallied over job security as the company leaned harder into AI. The Washington filing is the quieter version of the same story. The 52 roles are a small number, but they land in a state where the industry has spent two years shedding the jobs it once fought to fill.

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