The announcement by Stripe last week that it would create 200 jobs at its Dublin headquarters was a welcome piece of good news for the tech sector in Ireland.
The company has grown its workforce by 35 per cent since the start of the year, with plans to further expand its engineering operation here. But it also underscored the wildly changing fortunes of a crucial sector of the economy.
Ireland’s tech sector has been a driving force for the economy in recent years, but as companies try to cut costs globally and keep shareholders onside, the threat of job losses has returned. Across the Irish industry, cuts have been implemented across a number of different areas. Social media, payments technology, productivity and workflow – all have been hit by lay-offs since the start of the year.
Just this week, it emerged that Oracle is looking to cut another 70 Irish jobs this year as it continues to trim costs to fund its expensive push into artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and data centres.
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That has caused understandable nerves in the sector. The memory of the “tech wreck” of 2022 and 2023 is still fresh, when the cuts came fast, and they came with big numbers. Could we be heading for another?
For those who take a glass half-full approach, the work the economy has done to attract new investment has clawed back some of the ground we lost in the dark days. Employment in tech and related sectors hovered around 121,000 in September 2022 according to payroll data, or 159,500 according to the quarterly labour force survey compiled by the Central Statistics Office. At the end of 2025, those figures were 120,700 and 170,500 respectively.
With AI being touted as a game-changer for companies already seeking to cut costs, the State agencies’ moves to capture at least some of the opportunity offered by the growth of the technology might also offset the inevitable losses.
Meta was the first big name to announce a serious cull in 2026, and provided a warning of what was to come. The social media giant, which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, said in May it would reduce its Irish staff numbers by up to 350 jobs – a 20 per cent reduction and well in excess of the 10 per cent that had been expected.
When you tot it all up, the number of jobs lost at Meta over the past few years leaves the company at around half the size it was before the post-Covid reductions started. The plans to occupy a large campus in Dublin were scaled back some time ago, with Meta announcing it would sublet part of the development on the former AIB Bankcentre grounds.
There are repercussions, too, for companies that rely on multinationals for business. While the name Covalen may not have meant a lot to people working outside the tech sector, it is intertwined with some of the biggest names in the business. Part of the CPL Group, the contractor provides content moderation and AI training services for Meta. But the outsourced nature of the business means it – and its staff – are in the most precarious position when it comes to job security,
In April, the company notified workers that more than 700 jobs were at risk. That followed Meta’s announcement in March that it would rely more on AI systems in the future for content moderation, reducing the need for contractors. Again, the implication was that AI was being blamed for the reduction in numbers.
Meta isn’t the only social media company making cuts. Video-sharing platform TikTok has also been culling roles across the company in the name of efficiency.
The most recent round of cuts were a handful of roles in its ecommerce team – around a dozen, according to sources. But that came on the back of the loss of 670 roles concentrated on the company’s trust and safety division – which was loudly trumpeted when it located here – along with jobs in the company’s AI data service and operations team responsible for annotation and search operations services. Once again, AI played a role in the reasoning; the plan was to take the work currently being done by those staff and redistribute it among other TikTok offices, outsource it, or hand it over to AI.
The blow was softened somewhat by the creation of about 320 roles in the Dublin office, which were open to affected employees. That brought the total down to 350 jobs, but it was a significant reduction for a company that had, at its peak, employed about 3,000 people in Ireland.
Oracle told staff this week it would cut up to 70 roles, with the cuts concentrated in engineering and development. Some sales and finance positions are also expected to go. That follows the loss of 150 jobs earlier this year.
The move is part of a global restructuring of the business that has seen it cut its workforce by 13 per cent, or about 21,000 employees, as the company focuses on trimming areas where AI is expected to make roles redundant.
While Stripe is hiring, rival and one-time acquisition target PayPal is cutting back. The payments company, which has come under serious pressure from competitors in recent years, told staff in August that it would cut jobs at its Irish business. While initial numbers estimated the losses to be about 30, with the business support department primarily affected, it later emerged that a further 130 jobs across a range of departments were also at risk. That added up to almost 12 per cent of its Irish workforce.
The redundancies were not a surprise, although the figures might have been. PayPal had signalled plans to cut jobs globally in April, as part of strategy to trim costs, simplify operations, remove duplication and clarify reporting lines.
It is hard to pin the cuts down to a single business area or role. The type of work being hit across the tech sector is mixed, although high-tech roles are more likely to be spared, while people management – human resources, team leaders – and support services are being reduced as companies try to flatten their management structures.
When it comes to hiring though, the picture is a little clearer. Highly skilled tech roles are in demand, with AI, cybersecurity and data skills topping the list of new hires for companies.
Morgan McKinley’s quarterly employment monitor backs that up. It notes the shift in the third quarter from traditional development skills towards AI-enabled roles.
It notes software and data engineers are still in demand, albeit ones with practical AI capabilities.
“US companies establishing AI engineering hubs and centres of excellence in Ireland are adding further demand for AI, machine learning operations, data engineering, cloud, DevOps and security skills, as traditional contract demand for full-stack, Java and React/Node roles softens,” said Trayc Keevans, global FDI director, Morgan McKinley Ireland.
One of those companies establishing an AI centre of excellence in Ireland is Workday. Almost a year ago, the business software company announced it would create 200 jobs over three years at an AI centre at its new Dublin headquarters.
But Irish-based staff at the US-founded business were told last month that the company was cutting jobs, with as many as 80 at risk as part of a global move to trim numbers. About 80 per cent of the company’s 2,000 Irish employees are involved in research, product development and software engineering – the type of high-value roles that you would expect the company would hang on to.
This time, people management roles are in the firing line, although they are spread across the product and technology teams. At the same time, Workday is continuing to recruit for high-tech positions such as AI software and machine-learning engineers, with open roles on its website.
AI company Anthropic is also expanding, adding 200 jobs across engineering, sales and finance by 2027 as part of the expansion of its Dublin hub. Rival OpenAI is doing similar, creating 250 jobs over the next two years in engineering, finance, HR and other support roles.
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Cloud company Version 1 is recruiting for 250 new jobs, driven by the opening of its new AI studio in Dublin. That is in addition to 400 roles it previously announced for Northern Ireland.
US database company MongoDB, meanwhile, is investing €74 million, opening a new office in Cork and adding 200 jobs in engineering, product development, and customer-facing teams. The company is preparing to tap into demand for its data platform that could be supercharged by the increased adoption of agentic AI – systems that can carry out tasks without human intervention.
AI is becoming increasingly important in the labour market. But it can also be used as a handy smokescreen for companies. There is a level of scepticism around the claims by companies laying off employees that the layoffs are solely down to targeted investments in AI paying off.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that AI is an easy way to reduce headcount, but also claim it in a really positive, forward-thinking way,” says Christopher Paye, country director for The StepStone Group for Ireland. “Forty-six per cent of employers are increasing hiring; for the IT and the tech sector, 28 per cent of firms in Ireland are hiring for highly specialised roles such as AI and machine learning.”
Others note that there are broader market pressures that are coming into play, forcing companies to re-evaluate their workforce.
“While recent headlines have focused on job cuts, the reality is more nuanced. We have seen a number of high-profile reductions, particularly across parts of the technology sector, but AI is not the sole driver of these decisions,” said Laoise Mullane, director of Workforce Consulting and AI enablement at PwC Ireland.
“Organisations are also responding to broader pressures such as cost reduction, restructuring, and changing market conditions. While many of the headlines have come from the technology sector, the underlying forces shaping these decisions are extending far beyond technology roles alone.”
Looking at hiring trends though, there are jobs to be had in tech, as long as you have the right skills. As AI threats increase, so too does the need for AI-augmented cybersecurity. Mullane said many of the organisations were continuing to recruit for skills in areas such as AI, cybersecurity, data, cloud and technology engineering. There is also demand for candidates who can combine technical expertise with judgment, leadership and business understanding.
“Rather than a simple story of jobs being replaced by AI, we’re seeing a broader reshaping of work, with some roles declining, others emerging, and many more evolving as organisations rethink how work gets done,” Mullane said.
The shift in the labour market has also brought an important element to the fore: lifelong learning and keeping skills up to date.
“One of the things that we’re seeing is that there is a realisation that lifelong learning has become more important. Seventy-six per cent of people who responded to our last hiring trends update said that they believed that their skills were still relevant, but that they would need to upskill to remain relevant in the next five years. I don’t think that’s just across the tech sector,” says Paye.
“Everyone is realising we need to upskill.”
But concern remains around entry-level roles, long flagged as a target market for AI. A reduction there means graduates and those early on in their career have fewer opportunities to get on the career ladder. The latest hiring trends data from IrishJobs.ie found almost half of employers have reduced the number of entry and graduate level roles available in their organisation.
Paye says that could prove to be a short-sighted strategy for companies seeking to keep their shareholders happy.
“If you are no longer hiring graduates or bringing people in straight out of college, you are creating a skills gap for three, four or five years down the line. I’ll be interested to see how this reverses over the next few years, because I think you will see a lot of businesses, whether in the tech sector or not, who realise graduate recruitment wasn’t just about bringing people in to do entry-level tasks – it was about building for the future. The next middle management, the next senior management – a lot of them come through graduate schemes. In three or four years’ time, when your middle managers decide to move on, that pool of candidates is now going to be quite low,” he says.
“It is much harder to hire externally. It’s normally more costly, it takes longer, and salaries are higher when you’re when you’re hiring from outside your organisation. I think you will see businesses realising that it is short term Ebitda [earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation] help, and long-term it might take a little bit more of a chunk out of their bottom line.”
