Nobody likes seeing headlines about Big Tech layoffs, but some smaller companies are taking advantage of access to a fresh pool of top-tier talent.
Paul Jaeschke, chief people officer at PitchBook, told Business Insider that the private-market data platform was “definitely a beneficiary” of recent cuts across the industry.
Amazon let go of 16,000 employees in January from its corporate workforce of roughly 350,000. Meta, which employs about 78,000 people globally, is also planning to reduce its headcount by 10% this month.
While those cuts represent a relatively small share of each company’s workforce, in tech hubs like Seattle, they could translate into thousands of highly skilled workers re-entering the job market. Plenty of other smaller tech companies, such as Block and Atlassian, have made recent reductions, often citing the impact of AI.
PitchBook has also eliminated a few positions due to AI, the CPO said, specifically “product owner” roles. Jaeschke said the role helped translate requirements to engineering teams. The CPO said AI tools made those tasks more efficient. The company said the eliminated roles were a small percentage of its workforce, and half stayed at PitchBook and moved into product manager roles. PitchBook has a headcount of over 3,000 staff. Nearly 600 of them work in its Seattle headquarters.
For companies like PitchBook, tech layoffs create a rare hiring opportunity. Jaeschke said many PitchBook employees, himself included, come from Amazon, as well as Microsoft, Google, eBay, and other large tech firms. He said there’s been more interest lately from Big Tech employees, and that the firm has been successful in recruiting those candidates.
“We’ve really been able to hire a lot of people — a lot of great people — that in the past we might have had a tougher time hiring,” Jaeschke said.
He said that smaller companies like PitchBook can offer an appealing alternative to Big Tech by offering a faster pace of work, giving employees more ownership over projects, and providing access to multiple AI tools including Claude, OpenAI, LangChain, rather than requiring use of internal tools.
Jaeschke said recent hires from Amazon were excited to use a range of AI tools when they were brought on. Amazon recently rolled out Claude Code and Open AI’s Codex to corporate employees, expanding beyond its internal AI tool, Kiro. The tech giant continues to promote its in-house tool, but no longer requires separate approvals to officially use the other models.
The recent wave of layoffs has made top candidates more accessible, the CPO said, especially in highly in-demand roles, like machine learning engineers.
Hiring for these positions was more challenging previously, Jaesche said, but the company has had “a lot more traction over the last 12 to 18 months.” A PitchBook spokesperson told Business Insider that in the last two years, the company has more than quadrupled the size of its machine learning team. This year, it has hired 10 machine learning engineers and continues to grow the team, the spokesperson added.
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