PitchBook Uses Big Tech Layoffs as Hiring Advantage

PitchBook’s CPO says recent Big Tech cuts are helping it recruit top talent, while AI tools reshape roles and productivity.

When Big Tech layoffs dominate headlines, some companies see a quieter shift: a faster path to hiring the kind of talent that can be hard to win during tight competition.

Paul Jaeschke. chief product officer at PitchBook. said the private-market data platform has been a “definite beneficiary” of recent cuts across the tech industry.. His point was not that layoffs are good for workers. but that they can open a window for smaller firms able to move quickly and offer attractive work structures.

Several of the largest technology companies have recently reduced headcount.. Amazon let go of 16,000 employees in January from a corporate workforce of roughly 350,000.. Meta, which employs about 78,000 people globally, has also been planning to reduce its headcount by 10% this month.. While these job cuts represent a smaller share of each company’s overall workforce. the scale of Big Tech employment means even a fraction can translate into thousands of highly skilled workers re-entering the market in major tech hubs.

In cities such as Seattle, the recruiting impact may be outsized.. A concentration of former Big Tech employees with established technical backgrounds can change how employers compete for specialized roles. particularly when candidates are actively looking again.. PitchBook is one of the companies positioned to take advantage of that shift.

Other tech firms have also made reductions in recent months. and some have linked the decisions to the changing economics of AI.. Block and Atlassian, for instance, have conducted cuts while pointing to AI’s influence.. The broader implication for the market is that hiring demand may be shifting away from certain tasks and toward roles that integrate AI more directly into product and engineering workflows.

PitchBook itself has not been immune to those changes.. The company eliminated a few positions due to AI, specifically “product owner” roles.. Jaeschke said these roles served as a bridge, translating requirements to engineering teams.. In his account, AI tools made those translation tasks more efficient, reducing the need for some intermediate positions.

PitchBook said the eliminated roles represented a small percentage of its workforce.. It also reported that half of the affected employees stayed with the company and moved into product manager roles.. With a headcount of over 3. 000 staff. including nearly 600 people in its Seattle headquarters. the shift illustrates how companies can restructure internally while still using a newly available external talent pool.

Jaeschke suggested PitchBook can be an attractive alternative to Big Tech beyond just headcount availability.. The company’s pitch. as he described it. includes a faster pace of work. more ownership over projects. and the ability to work with multiple AI tools rather than being limited to a single in-house option.

He also said many PitchBook employees—himself included—have previously worked at large companies such as Amazon. Microsoft. Google. and eBay.. That shared background may matter in recruitment because candidates familiar with Big Tech environments can more readily understand how a smaller firm operates and how responsibilities may differ.

Jaeschke added that interest from Big Tech employees has increased in recent months. and that PitchBook has been successful in recruiting them.. In his words. the company has been able to hire a lot of people. including candidates it might have had more difficulty attracting before the recent industry cuts.

A key part of the appeal, he said, is access to multiple AI tools.. PitchBook can support work that uses Claude. OpenAI. and LangChain. which the CPO argued helps teams experiment and execute without being confined to internal systems.. He contrasted this with the idea that employees at larger firms may have to rely on a narrower set of tools due to approvals or internal constraints.

The hiring advantage tied to AI tools is connected to changes at Amazon as well.. Jaeschke pointed out that Amazon recently rolled out Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex to corporate employees. expanding beyond its internal AI tool. Kiro.. At the same time. Amazon no longer requires separate approvals to officially use the other models. while it continues promoting its in-house tool.. That combination suggests how AI access policies can influence employee readiness to adopt new workflows quickly.

The report also ties the wave of layoffs to a practical labor-market effect: making top candidates more accessible, especially in roles that remain in high demand. Machine learning engineering was highlighted as one of the areas where candidates are especially sought after.

Hiring for these roles was described as more difficult in the past, but Jaeschke said PitchBook has gained “a lot more traction” over the last 12 to 18 months. The company’s machine learning strategy appears to be expanding alongside its recruitment efforts.

A PitchBook spokesperson told that in the last two years. the company has more than quadrupled the size of its machine learning team.. This year, it has hired 10 machine learning engineers and continues to grow the unit, according to the spokesperson.. That growth helps explain why layoffs elsewhere could translate into concrete hiring momentum for PitchBook rather than simply more resumes in a pipeline.

For investors and operators watching tech labor dynamics. the pitch from PitchBook reflects a broader industry rebalancing: organizations are cutting some jobs. investing in others. and recalibrating roles as AI changes how product requirements are communicated and delivered.. In that environment. layoffs at large employers can act as a supply shock for certain skill sets. while smaller firms with faster decision-making may be able to translate availability into headcount and project execution—quickly.

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