TL;DR
Cloudflare’s engineering team grew 45% even after mass layoffs, as CEO Prince says AI kills off “measurer” roles while builders and salespeople survive.
Cloudflare engineering workforce increased 45 percentt in the weeks after the company cut 1,100 jobs in Mayaccording to BNP Paribas data extracted 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 total workforce shrank by a fifth. CEO Matthew Prince confirmed the trend and offered a framework for understanding it: Every company, he said, is made up of builders, salespeople and measurers, and AI is eliminating the third group.
Prince told Business Insider that the distinction is simple. The builders make the product, the sellers generate the revenue, and the meters track, report, and coordinate the work of the first two groups. The roles being eliminated at Cloudflare and across the tech industry fall overwhelmingly into the category of measurers: middle managers, operations staff, financial analysts and marketing coordinators whose work AI agents can now approximate.
“If you think about what AI is most effective at, it’s looking at data sets and summarizing them,“Prince said. He added that if his engineers became more productive with AI, he would hire more, not less. The logic is that AI amplifies the output of the people who build and sell, but replaces those whose primary role is monitoring and reporting.
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The BNP Paribas analysis, which Business Insider said Prince reviewed and confirmed, could not be independently verified outside of that report. LinkedIn profile data captures job changes and may not perfectly reflect internal workforce. But the direction is consistent with Prince’s stated strategy: Cloudflare made big cuts and then invested heavily in the feature it views as most valuable.
The pattern is not exclusive to Cloudflare. TrueUp, a platform that tracks technology hiring, reports that open technology positions increased 14 percent in 2026 compared to a year ago, and hardware engineering positions increased 52 percent. Gains are concentrated in technical and product roles, while vacancies in operations, human resources and general management have decreased.
Companies are hiring more people who build things and fewer people who manage the people who build things. GitLab followed a similar playbook in Maycutting seven percent of its workforce and eliminating up to three levels of management while reorganizing its engineering division into 60 autonomous teams. CEO Bill Staples called it preparation for the “he was an agent” and the companies that have cut most aggressively are not reducing their engineering capacity but concentrating it.
Prince’s framework carries an implicit warning for anyone whose job description focuses on coordination, reporting, or process management. He was forthright about the trajectory, telling Business Insider that “Many of the support functions will not be the ones that drive companies forward.“If your work can be described as measuring what other people produce, the category you occupy is the one that AI targets first.
Broader labor market data complicates the picture slightly. Recently, technology CEOs have gone from warning about job losses in AI to insisting that AI will create jobs.a shift that coincides with the IPO approach of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Prince’s framework falls somewhere between the two narratives: he doesn’t claim that AI creates jobs across the board, but rather that it creates engineering jobs specifically, at the expense of everyone else.
Whether the builders-sellers-meters model holds beyond Cloudflare is an open question. Not all measurement positions are expendable, and not all companies can absorb a 45 percent engineering expansion while cutting a fifth of their total workforce. The framework also assumes that AI tools are reliable enough to replace human judgment in supervisory functions, an assumption that continues to be questioned even among AI researchers.
What is not in question is the direction of the hiring. Cloudflare’s revenue in the first quarter of 2026 grew 34 percent year over year to $640 million, and the company added a record number of enterprise customers even as it eliminated 1,100 positions. The restructuring was driven not by financial weakness but by a bet that the work those people did can now be done by software, and that the savings would be better spent on engineers who wrote more.
Prince’s taxonomy names a change that dozens of companies are executing simultaneously, but rarely describes it clearly. The question for the tens of thousands of displaced workers across the tech sector this year is whether “meter” is a temporary label applied to roles that will eventually return, or a permanent verdict on an entire job category.
