Spotify Layoffs — 2023: 1,500 Roles Impacted

CEO Daniel Ek cited the need to "right-size" costs after rapid headcount growth; this round followed two earlier 2023 cuts.

The cut totals approximately 1,500 roles and was announced on December 4, 2023. As with any large reduction, the published figure reflects the size of the program at announcement — actual departures may shift slightly as voluntary attrition is counted and internal transfers close. We pulled the headcount directly from the cited source rather than from third-party trackers, and we will update this page if Spotify clarifies the number in a later filing or earnings call.

For the full announcement language, read the original source: https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-12-04/an-update-from-our-ceo-daniel-ek/. If you are an impacted Spotify employee and your experience differs from what the company published, the rest of this page is for you.

In the weeks following an announcement of this size, the most useful signal isn’t the headcount itself — it’s the shape of the cut. Was it concentrated in one function (engineering, recruiting, communications)? Was it tied to the wind-down of a specific product? Did the company immediately backfill in adjacent areas such as AI infrastructure or platform reliability? We track those signals where Spotify or credible reporting makes them public, and we use them to refine the rehire pathways further down this page so that you’re comparing against employers genuinely hiring for your function rather than a generic competitor list.

Below are example role titles that were open at Spotify in the months before this layoff and are no longer accepting applications. If you held one of these titles, your nearest-match opportunities are in the rehire pathways below — pre-tailored versions of the same role at competitors with active reqs.

Workzil archives closed postings for context so you can show hiring managers your past responsibilities matched current market language. Reference any of these titles in your Workzil profile and we’ll surface comparable open roles across our 50+ partner boards.

Based on hiring activity in the same quarter as the Spotify announcement, the following sibling and competitor employers were actively bringing on talent in overlapping functions. These are starting points, not guarantees — open reqs shift weekly — but if your background is at Spotify, your fastest path to a comparable role usually runs through this short list.

Workzil indexes nightly across each of these employers, so a single saved search will surface new openings as soon as they’re posted. You can also link directly into each company page below for current openings, visa-sponsorship history, and team-by-team hiring trends.