Meta(META.US) cuts workforce against the tide to recruit AI talents: global slimming 5%, urgently hiring machine learning engineers

According to an internal memo, Meta Platforms (META.US), Facebook's parent company, plans to start laying off employees across the company next week, while accelerating the hiring of machine learning engineers. The layoff notices will begin to be sent out at 5 a.m. local time on Monday in most countries, including the U.S.

However, employees in Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands will be exempted from the layoffs due to local regulations. Employees in more than a dozen other countries in Europe, Asia and Africa will receive their notices between February 11 and February 18.

Meta's head of human resources, Janelle Gale, mentioned in the memo that the layoffs would be based on performance, called "performance terminations," and would target about 5% of the "lowest performing" employees, while filling some of the resulting vacancies.

Different from previous layoffs, Meta plans to keep its offices open on Monday and will not provide further updates to offer more details about the layoff decisions.

Meanwhile, Peng Fan, vice president of monetization engineering, also asked employees to help speed up the hiring process for machine learning engineers and other "business critical" engineering roles in another memo released on Friday. The hiring process is planned to take place between February 11 and March 13.