Cisco To Lay Off 471 Workers In California, Software Engineers Hit Hardest

Cisco tells California officials it will lay off hundreds of employees in San Francisco, Milpitas and San Jose, with software engineering roles heavily affected, as part of a broader restructuring unveiled in May with the company’s announcement that it would lay off nearly 4,000 employees this year.

Just a month after disclosing a significant restructuring effort that would eliminate thousands of jobs, Cisco detailed plans to lay off nearly 500 employees in California, a large concentration of which are involved in software engineering.

The networking, security, and AI technology developer in recent weeks sent three Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) letters to the California Employment Development Department detailing the dozens of job cuts. Under California’s WARN Act, employers with 75 or more employees are required to provide 60 days’ advance written notification.

The WARN letters stated that employees in May were notified of the layoffs, which would be effective in mid-July.

“This action is expected to be permanent in nature. Employees will be notified of the employment layoffs on May 14, 2026, and will be terminated on July 13, 2026 (the termination date will be effective on that date or on a date with the 13-day period immediately following that date),” the letters stated. They were signed by Saidah Grayson Dill, Cisco’s vice president and deputy general counsel for employment law.

The layoffs appear to be part of a wider planned layoff of nearly 4,000 employees Cisco unveiled in May.

Cisco Chair and CEO Chuck Robbins, in his prepared remarks for financial analysts during the company’s fiscal third quarter 2026 quarterly conference call, unveiled the restructuring plan aimed at focusing resources on strategic areas.

Between the latest three letters, Cisco lists 471 affected employees, including 81 in San Francisco, 154 in Milpitas, and 236 in San Jose.

The largest individual job-title group of the employees expected to be laid off is software engineer, with 56 affected employees across the three notices. That includes three in San Francisco, 34 in Milpitas, and 19 in San Jose.

The second-largest individual grouping is software engineering technical leader, with 39 affected employees across the three notices including five in San Francisco, 27 in Milpitas, and seven in San Jose.

Other notable title concentrations include engineering product manager with 17 affected employees; software engineering leader with 15, director of software engineering with 12; engineering program manager with 12, director of product management with nine, business operations manager with eight, site reliability engineer with seven, program manager with seven, and software QA engineer with seven.

An executive at a longtime U.S.-based Cisco channel partner told CRN Friday via text message that the current round of layoffs is not a surprise.

“My sources point to this [being] the regular Cisco cadence before every Q2 and Q4 earnings announcements to trim up headcount costs,” the executive wrote.