Cloudflare's engineering personnel increased by 45% following a reduction of 1,100 jobs, and its CEO has developed a framework to determine which roles will endure in the age of AI.

      **TL;DR** Cloudflare's engineering team increased by 45% despite mass layoffs, as CEO Matthew Prince states that AI is eliminating "measurer" roles while builders and sellers persist. According to BNP Paribas data sourced from LinkedIn profiles, Cloudflare's engineering workforce grew from 1,308 to 1,894 in the weeks following the layoff of 1,100 employees in May, even as the overall workforce decreased by 20%. Prince confirmed this trend, explaining that every company consists of builders, sellers, and measurers, with AI primarily affecting the latter group.

      He described the roles: builders create products, sellers generate revenue, and measurers oversee and report on the activities of the first two. The positions being eliminated at Cloudflare and across the tech industry predominantly belong to the measurer segment, including middle managers, operations personnel, finance analysts, and marketing coordinators—roles that AI can now replicate.

      Prince stated that AI excels at analyzing data sets and summarizing them, and if AI boosts the productivity of his engineers, he would hire more, not fewer. This indicates that AI enhances the work of builders and sellers while replacing those focused on oversight and reporting.

      The BNP Paribas analysis, reviewed by Prince, could not be independently verified, but aligns with his strategy of broadly cutting jobs before heavily investing in what he sees as the most valuable roles. This trend is not exclusive to Cloudflare; TrueUp reports a 14% increase in technology job openings in 2026 compared to the previous year, with hardware engineering positions rising by 52%. The growth is primarily in technical and product roles, while openings in operations, HR, and management have decreased.

      Companies are opting to hire more individuals who create and fewer who manage these creators. GitLab, for instance, laid off 7% of its workforce and streamlined its management structure, reorganizing its engineering division into 60 independent teams. CEO Bill Staples described this as preparation for the "agentic era," where companies cutting back aggressively are not reducing engineering capacity but focusing it.

      Prince's framework serves as a warning to those in coordination, reporting, or process management roles, as he indicated that "many support roles will not be the ones driving companies in the future." If your job primarily involves measuring what others produce, you may be in the most vulnerable category to AI advancements.

      While the broader labor market trends complicate this view—with tech CEOs shifting from worrying about AI job losses to claiming AI will generate jobs, especially ahead of upcoming IPOs for companies like OpenAI and Anthropic—Prince offers a middle ground. He states that while AI may not create jobs across the board, it is generating engineering roles specifically, at the cost of others.

      Whether this builders-sellers-measurers model can be applied universally remains uncertain. Not all measurer roles are expendable, and not every company can manage a 45% increase in engineering positions while cutting a fifth of its workforce. Additionally, the assumption that AI tools can reliably replace human oversight remains a debated topic among researchers.

      What is indisputable is the hiring direction. Cloudflare reported a 34% year-over-year revenue growth to $640 million for Q1 2026 and gained a record number of enterprise customers despite laying off 1,100 employees. This restructuring was motivated not by financial struggles but by the belief that the work previously performed by those employees can now be accomplished by software, allowing for investment in engineers who develop this software.

      Prince's classification sheds light on a shift that many companies are treading but often do not articulate clearly. The pressing question for the thousands of displaced tech workers is whether "measurer" is a temporary designation for roles that may return or a definitive conclusion regarding a whole category of work.