Cloudflare's engineering staff increased by 45% following the reduction of 1,100 positions, and its CEO has established a criterion for determining who will thrive in the AI landscape.

      **TL;DR** Cloudflare's engineering team expanded by 45% despite significant layoffs, as CEO Matthew Prince states that AI is eliminating "measurer" roles while preserving builders and sellers.

      According to data from BNP Paribas sourced from LinkedIn, Cloudflare's engineering staff increased from 1,308 to 1,894 in the weeks following the company’s layoff of 1,100 employees in May, highlighting a 45% growth in engineering personnel even as the overall workforce declined by 20%. CEO Matthew Prince confirmed this trend and explained it through a framework where companies consist of builders, sellers, and measurers, with AI predominantly replacing the measurers.

      Prince clarified this distinction, stating that builders create the product, sellers generate revenue, and measurers oversee and report on the activities of the first two groups. The positions being eliminated at Cloudflare and throughout the tech sector largely fall within the measurer category, which includes middle management, operations personnel, finance analysts, and marketing coordinators, whose tasks can increasingly be managed by AI.

      "If you think about what AI does best, it’s analyzing data sets and summarizing them," Prince commented. He mentioned that if AI enables his engineers to be more efficient, he would prefer to hire more engineers rather than fewer. His point is that while AI boosts the productivity of builders and sellers, it supplants those whose roles are primarily focused on reporting and oversight.

      The analysis from BNP Paribas, as reported by Business Insider, is based on information that Prince has reviewed and confirmed, though it has not been independently verified. LinkedIn data on job title modifications may not perfectly mirror actual staffing levels but aligns with Prince’s strategy: Cloudflare has broadly reduced its workforce while significantly investing in its crucial functions.

      This trend isn't exclusive to Cloudflare. TrueUp, a tech hiring tracking platform, indicates that open tech roles have increased by 14% in 2026 compared to the previous year, with hardware engineering roles rising by 52%. The growth is primarily in technical and product positions, while openings in operations, HR, and general management have declined.

      Organizations are hiring more individuals focused on building and fewer on managing those builders. GitLab adopted a similar approach in May, laying off 7% of its workforce and eliminating several layers of management while restructuring its engineering division into 60 self-sufficient teams. CEO Bill Staples referred to this as gearing up for the “agentic era,” noting that companies that have made the most significant cuts are consolidating rather than lessening their engineering capabilities.

      Prince’s framework serves as a cautionary note for roles centered around coordination, reporting, or process management. He candidly indicated to Business Insider that “many support roles are unlikely to be the future drivers of companies.” If your job primarily involves assessing the output of others, it is the first area targeted by AI.

      The broader labor market data adds some complexity to this narrative. Recently, tech CEOs have shifted from cautioning about AI-related job loss to asserting that AI will create new jobs, a change that comes at a time when companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are approaching IPOs. Prince’s perspective occupies a middle ground: he doesn’t claim that AI will create jobs universally but argues it will lead to more engineering positions specifically, at the cost of other categories.

      It remains uncertain whether the builders-sellers-measurers framework applies to other companies beyond Cloudflare. Not every measurer position is expendable, and not all firms can accommodate a 45% increase in engineering staff while concurrently reducing a fifth of their total workforce. This framework also presumes that AI tools are trustworthy enough to take over human judgment in oversight roles, an assumption that is heavily debated even among AI specialists.

      What is undeniably clear is the trend in hiring. Cloudflare reported a 34% year-over-year revenue increase in Q1 2026 to $640 million, acquiring a record number of enterprise clients despite laying off 1,100 workers. This restructuring wasn't driven by financial distress but rather by the belief that the functions these employees performed can now be automated, allowing savings to be redirected towards hiring more engineers to create more software.

      Prince's classification highlights a transformation being undertaken by numerous companies simultaneously but rarely articulated so explicitly. The pressing question for the many workers displaced in the tech sector this year is whether "measurer" is a temporary categorization of roles that may eventually re-emerge, or if it represents a lasting conclusion regarding an entire sector of work.