Oracle is laying off 359 employees in Washington state βΒ its second significant job cuts this year β according to aΒ filingΒ Wednesday with the state Employment Security Department.
The cuts affect remote employees across Washington state as well as on-site staff at Oracleβs downtown Seattle facilities, located in the Russell Investments Center on 2nd Avenue and at 2025 5th Ave.
Oracle noted in its Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, signed by HR Senior VP Anje Dodson, that its βSeattle sites are not closing.β Impacted employees received notice Monday and their last day will be Nov. 13.
The cuts heavily impact technical engineering and management roles across the enterprise software giant. According to the filing, affected titles include dozens of software developers, core infrastructure and platform software engineers, program managers, and site reliability engineers. Senior leadership was also affected by the reduction, with notices sent to multiple vice presidents, directors of engineering and product management, and principal data scientists.
The cuts are part of broader nationwide layoffs at Oracle. Business Insider reported this week that the tech giant is trimming payroll and raising capital as it racks up tens of billions of dollars in debt to fund massive AI data center infrastructure investments.
Internal emails sent to affected employees cited a βbroader organizational change,β coming on the heels of a regulatory filing where Oracle explicitly noted that the deployment of AI technologies across its operations has resulted in workforce reductions. Oracleβs global headcount fell by roughly 21,000 employees, or 13%, over the past fiscal year.
The new round of layoffs comes just six months after Oracle eliminated 491 jobs in Washington state in March. That reduction similarly targeted engineering talent β sweeping up more than 230 software developers alongside senior directors and vice presidents β as part of an initial wave of cuts tied to the companyβs shift toward AI-led software development.
Combined, the two workforce reductions have slashed 850 Oracle positions in the state this year.
Neuramill co-founders Nick Khormaei (COO) and Nistha Mitra (CEO) at the Reindustrialize summit in Detroit. (Photo courtesy of Neuramill)
When machinists with decades of experience retire, everything they know about how metal behaves under a cutting tool β or anything else they learned through a career of scrapped parts and expensive mistakes β walks out the door with them.
A startup with roots in Seattle, started by two founders in their 20s, is building technology to capture that knowledge long before that point.
Neuramill, founded last year by CEO Nistha Mitra and COO Nick Khormaei, is developing what the company calls an intelligence layer for high-precision manufacturing.
The software reads a design file and figures out how the part should be made: which tools, which machines, and in what order. A machinist reviews and approves every plan before anything reaches the floor.
βThis is a high-skill job, and nobodyβs retaining this information,β Mitra said. When the machinists who know how to build complex jet engine parts retire, she said, that knowledge goes with them. βWe help retain that for the future generation.β
Khormaei said the two founders spent much of the past year visiting machine shops to watch how the work gets done.
βThe craft itself is so impressive,β he said. βTheyβre able to look at these drawings and models that come in and know exactly how to build it. Itβs like theyβre doing real-time physics simulation.β
Early customers and partners: The company says it has closed a six-figure contract with a major defense contractor, one of the companies known in the industry as primes. Neuramill declined to name the contractor.
Two of the machine shops using the software are Diamond Machine Works, a Seattle precision machining company founded in 1959, and VTN Manufacturing in San Jose, Calif. Satellite maker Astranis is a design partner.
Mitra said the company is not yet selling broadly, but has been paid by some of the early customers testing the software.
How they got here: Mitra, 26, has a computer science degree from the University of Maryland and spent three years at Oracle, most recently as an AI applied scientist in Seattle, working on multimodal models that reason across several kinds of data at once.
Khormaei, 24, holds bachelorβs and masterβs degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Washington. He was a propulsion engineer at Boeing in Everett, where he worked on 777X fuel system electrical certification, and then spent part of last year at SpaceX as an integration and test engineer on Starlink manufacturing in Redmond.
Where the software fits in: Neuramillβs technology works at a stage that has stayed largely manual: after the design file arrives, and before a programmer opens the computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software that translates decisions into machine instructions.
Rather than position the company against Siemens and Mastercam, Mitra said Neuramill plugs into those systems. The company recently joined Siemensβ Frontier Partner Program, which gives startups access to the companyβs software tools.
βAt this point we are very collaborative with these companies,β she said, adding that the established vendors are looking for new technology of their own.
Bay Area and Seattle: Both founders worked in the Seattle region before leaving for San Francisco, a move Mitra described to GeekWire in February. They are back every four or five weeks now, working out of Foundations, the Seattle founder hub.
βWe love this ecosystem. It gave birth to Neuramill,β Mitra said. They keep coming back in part for the customers: βThis is a booming ecosystem in space and in aerospace.β
Funding and team: Neuramill has raised an undisclosed amount from Ascend, Breakwater Ventures, Schema Ventures, Creative Destruction Lab, Acequia Capital and Correlation Ventures.
The team is six people plus a contractor: the two founders, a chief research scientist who worked with Mitra at Oracle, and three engineers, one of them a machinist.
Whatβs next: The long-term goal, Mitra said, is a βworld modelβ for manufacturing: a system that can reason across geometry, materials and machine behavior at any level of complexity. Even then, she sees a role for the people on the shop floor.
βThere is a beauty to the craft of manufacturing that we should really respect,β she said. βThere are some places where humans should not be extracted out of an industry, and I think manufacturing is one of them.β