Cruise LLC is laying off 535 workers in the Bay Area across five different locations, according to a WARN notice filed by the company.
The offices affected are its San Francisco headquarters at 333 Brannan Street, its 2nd S.F. office at 1201 Bryant, its Sunnyvale office at 840 W California Ave. and its South San Francisco office at 175 Sylvester Road.
The layoffs targeted a wide variety of roles from recruiters to middle managers to machine learning engineers.
The move is part of a broader culling affecting 24% of its permanent staff or around 900 of its 3,800 employees across the country, according to an internal email to employees that the company also published in a blog post Thursday.
The San Francisco-based autonomous vehicle startup is owned by General Motors, which has recently signaled it would be cutting back investment and pausing production of a model of autonomous cars without drivers seats designed by Cruise.
Employees affected by the layoff will remain on payroll until Feb. 12 and then are eligible for 8 weeks of pay with an additional two weeks for every year served at Cruise over three years.
"Many of you will be impacted because we aren’t commercializing as quickly, and therefore don’t need support in certain cities or facilities," the email said. "In other cases, we restructured teams based on the work we’re prioritizing."
The layoffs came just a day after Cruise let go of nine executives as a result of a safety investigation spurred by an October incident where a driverless Cruise car dragged a woman 20 feet on a San Francisco road.
Following the accident, the California Department of Motor Vehicles and the state Public Utilities Commission pulled Cruise's permits to operate in the state, and Cruise voluntarily recalled its fleet of vehicles.
The company now faces fines for allegedly misleading regulators about the incident during the initial reporting phase, when the company left out key details like that the woman was dragged while the robotaxi was executing a pull over maneuver, according to Reuters.
Cruise CEO and co-founder Kyle Vogt resigned in November without giving a reason for the departure. The company is currently led by its president and chief technology officer, Mo Elshenawy.
