Shopify Lays Off Engineering VPs Amid Meetings, Slack Changes

• Shopify laid off at the least two engineering vice presidents earlier in January. 
• The departures got here as Shopify rolled out its “Chaos Monkey” plan to optimize productiveness.
• “The speedy tempo of change in commerce typically necessitates organizational changes,” a spokesperson stated.

Shopify laid off at the least two high-ranking engineering leaders this month, in line with individuals conversant in the matter. 

The two workers had been VP of Infrastructure Mike Lents and VP of Engineering Ravi Byakod. Lents had joined Shopify in May after greater than 9 years at ServiceNow, and Byakod joined final February after stints at Adobe, eBay, Flipkart, and Google, in line with their LinkedIn profiles.

Lents and Byakod didn’t return Insider’s requests for remark. A Shopify spokesperson confirmed the departures. 

“We thank them for his or her contributions to the corporate and our retailers,” the spokesperson stated. “The speedy tempo of change in commerce typically necessitates organizational changes to assist guarantee Shopify and our retailers are greatest supported to succeed over the long run.”

Lents and Byakod usually are not the one senior executives to depart Shopify up to now this 12 months. Brandon Chu, the VP of product acceleration, announced his departure on LinkedIn earlier in January, as did Shimona Mehta, Shopify’s managing director for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. 

The departures got here as Shopify made a sequence of adjustments to emphasise productiveness and effectivity amongst its workforce. In a transfer it referred to as “Chaos Monkey 2023” internally, Shopify shut down public Slack channels and deleted all conferences with greater than two individuals. 

Rumors have additionally been swirling internally that extra layoffs might be on the way in which, two workers stated. The spokesperson stated that the corporate has no further layoffs deliberate. 

Shopify has been adjusting to a brand new regular as its progress has normalized following the early days of the pandemic. 

Shopify laid off about 10% of its workforce, which included greater than 1,000 individuals, in July 2022. At the time, CEO Tobi Lütke stated the cuts had been being made as a result of the corporate had overinvested whereas betting that the e-commerce bump fueled by the Covid-19 pandemic would proceed. 

But the corporate additionally quietly laid off smaller numbers of workers each earlier than and after that enormous spherical of layoffs was introduced. In some circumstances, these workers received less severance pay than within the public layoff. Several former workers accused the company of falsely citing performance issues as the explanation behind what the staff argued had been really layoffs of a number of dozen employees earlier this 12 months. It continued to put off dozens of workers following July’s mass layoff, the Globe & Mail reported in September.

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