A Meta engineer laid off in May has described how the company he joined as a conference-room technician in 2012 became almost unrecognisable by the time he left, as sweeping AI-driven restructuring reshaped priorities, leadership and entire divisions around him.
Henry Chen, 38, spent more than 13 years working his way from an audio-visual contractor role at Facebook to tech lead, before losing his job on 20 May as part of what Reuters reported was a first wave of cuts targeting approximately 10% of Meta’s global workforce, or close to 8,000 employees, with further reductions planned later in 2026.
The scale of the restructuring extended well beyond redundancies. According to an internal memo seen by Reuters via Yahoo Finance, Meta Chief People Officer Janelle Gale told staff that around 7,000 employees would be moved into new roles focused on AI workflows, while 6,000 open positions were closed outright. Taken together, the layoffs and transfers were set to affect roughly 20% of the company’s workforce.
In a memo to staff on 20 May, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg framed the cuts as essential given competitive pressure. CNBC reported that Zuckerberg told employees ‘success isn’t a given’ in the race to lead on artificial intelligence, and that teams working on AI infrastructure, foundation models and AI monetisation would be shielded from cuts.
How a Meta Engineer Laid Off in May Experienced the Shift
Chen said the changes in the company’s character had been building since the large-scale layoffs of late 2022 and early 2023, when the focus shifted towards doing more with fewer resources. Then, roughly a year and a half later, the emphasis swung again towards ambitious building. Shifting leadership and changing priorities made it increasingly difficult to know where his team was headed.
A four-month paternity leave from August 2025 made the disorientation sharper. By the time he returned to work, the company was using AI far more extensively, team structures had changed and leadership had turned over. He described it as feeling like the whole company had changed in his absence.
His unease had already prompted him to begin looking for new roles in the weeks before the layoff, though he stopped once the news arrived. Meta provided what he described as a generous severance package reflecting his roughly 10 years as a full-time employee. Business Insider reported that Meta’s standard US severance formula for this period comprised 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for every year of service.
The financial cushion, combined with his children’s summer break, led him to take about a month away from the search before returning to it.
From Wedding DJ to Conference Room Tech Lead: A Career Built on Saying Yes
Chen’s path to a senior engineering role at one of the world’s largest technology companies began unconventionally. After leaving San Jose State University without completing his degree, he worked as a wedding DJ before taking an audio-visual contract role that happened to be based at Facebook. He started in 2012 with no expectation it would turn into a career.
Facebook’s rapid growth created the opening. Within a few years, Chen had moved from inspecting conference rooms as a technician to building them out. In 2015 he secured a full-time operations engineer role managing the collaboration technologies across Facebook’s conference estate.
The turning point came around 2017, when the number of conference rooms was expanding fast. With little coding experience, Chen began experimenting with Python to automate updates across rooms. The script he wrote accelerated the process substantially and redirected his career towards software engineering, eventually leading to a tech lead position focused on the technology underpinning Meta’s conferencing infrastructure.
The May 2026 round was not the first time Chen had lived through significant reductions at Meta. Axios reported that in January 2025 Meta notified employees it intended to cut the lowest-performing 5% of staff, roughly 3,600 people, marking a third major round of layoffs in three years and one framed as performance-based rather than driven by cost efficiencies. During earlier rounds, Chen had felt his work was critical enough to protect him. This time, the feeling was different, even though no specific warning preceded his departure.
The May restructuring also created new organisational structures. Reuters reported that Meta moved engineers from across the company into a new Applied AI organisation tasked with developing AI agents capable of writing code and completing complex tasks autonomously, while some staff were transferred into Meta Small Business, a unit set up the previous month.
Now back in active job-search mode, Chen is weighing roles in collaboration technology, broader IT at smaller companies, and software engineering. He is working with a coach to strengthen his grasp of industry-standard system design, having spent years on tools and platforms unique to Meta. His advice to others navigating a layoff: if the financial position allows, resist the pressure to accept the first offer that arrives.
Whether teams protected from the May cuts remain insulated will become clearer when Meta’s next planned wave of reductions lands later in 2026.