Monday.com Lays Off 620 Employees to Become “AI Work Platform”: What Singapore Employers Must Do in the Next 72 Hours

The Facts: Monday.com's 620-Person AI Restructuring

On July 22, 2026, Monday.com announced the elimination of 620 positions — approximately 20% of its total workforce. The cuts span engineering, product management, customer success, and operations teams across the company's Tel Aviv headquarters and international offices. Co-CEO Eran Zinman was emphatic in his internal memo, subsequently shared with TechCrunch: this is “NOT a cost-saving measure” but a fundamental restructuring to transform Monday.com from a project management and CRM platform into what he calls an “AI Work Platform.”

The financial reality tells a more complicated story. Monday.com is taking US$45–55 million in restructuring charges, its stock has plunged approximately 75% from its peak over the past year, and the “AI Work Platform” vision remains a strategic aspiration rather than a shipped product. The company is essentially betting its future on a thesis that AI-native workflow automation will replace the manual project management tools that built its SGD 2.8 billion revenue base. Whether that bet succeeds is Monday.com's problem. What matters for Singapore employers is what happens to the 620 engineers, product managers, and technical specialists who just became available on the global talent market.

Monday.com's layoffs are not an isolated event. They are the latest data point in what has become the defining labour market trend of 2026: 205,832 tech workers laid off across 322 separate events globally this year. AI has been cited as the primary restructuring justification for four consecutive months, contributing to 101,743 layoff announcements in the United States alone. Companies as diverse as Freshworks (customer support automation), Coinbase (AI trading infrastructure), and Fidelity (800 positions eliminated in an AI-driven restructuring that was simultaneously a hiring spree for AI roles) have all used the same playbook: cut traditional roles, redirect budget to AI capabilities, and announce a “transformation” that Wall Street rewards with a temporary stock bump.

For Singapore, this global restructuring wave creates what economists call a counter-cyclical opportunity. While global tech companies are shedding experienced engineers, Singapore is facing its most acute talent shortage in a decade. IMDA projects a sustained shortage of 55,000 tech professionals across software engineering, data science, cybersecurity, and AI/ML roles. That gap is not shrinking — it is widening as Google invests SGD 5 billion in a Singapore engineering centre, Applied Materials creates 1,000 jobs with its SGD 600 million Tampines facility, and Southeast Asian unicorns scale their engineering teams to compete with Chinese and American incumbents.

Why Monday.com Says This Is “Not Cost-Cutting” — And Why That Matters More

Co-CEO Eran Zinman's insistence that Monday.com's restructuring is not about saving money deserves closer examination, because the distinction has direct implications for the quality of talent entering the market. When a company cuts staff to reduce burn rate, it typically eliminates the most junior or least productive employees first. When a company restructures to pivot its product, it eliminates the roles that no longer align with the new direction — regardless of performance quality. This means Monday.com is releasing high-performing engineers whose skill sets (traditional SaaS development, manual workflow automation, non-AI product management) are excellent but misaligned with the company's new AI-centric roadmap.

For Singapore employers, this is the critical insight. Monday.com's displaced engineers are not underperformers who were cut in a downturn. They are production-grade professionals who built and maintained a platform serving 225,000 paying customers across 200 countries. They understand enterprise SaaS at scale — deployment pipelines, multi-tenant architecture, internationalisation, compliance, and the unglamorous but essential work of keeping production systems running at 99.99% uptime. This operational maturity is precisely what Singapore's growing tech ecosystem needs, and precisely what is hardest to find in a market where IMDA reports 55,000 unfilled tech positions.

The restructuring charges of US$45–55 million (approximately SGD 60–74 million) also signal the seriousness of the pivot. Monday.com is not trimming around the edges. It is making a bet of existential proportions that its future lies in AI-native workflow orchestration rather than the manual project management tools that generated its revenue. The engineers who built those manual tools — the React developers, Node.js engineers, Python backend developers, and full-stack generalists — are exactly the profiles that Singapore employers list as their top three hardest-to-fill roles in every quarterly talent survey.

The AI Restructuring Pattern: 4 Consecutive Months of “AI-Driven” Layoffs

Monday.com's pivot fits a pattern that has now repeated across the technology sector for four consecutive months. The mechanics are remarkably consistent: a public company faces slowing revenue growth or stock price pressure, announces an “AI transformation,” eliminates 15–25% of traditional roles, hires a smaller number of AI specialists, and presents the net headcount reduction as strategic foresight rather than cost management. The stock typically rises 5–15% on the announcement, validating the approach and encouraging other companies to follow.

The numbers in the US alone are stark. Challenger, Gray & Christmas data shows 101,743 layoff announcements where AI was cited as a contributing factor — either as the reason for role elimination (AI replacing the function) or as the strategic direction that renders certain positions redundant. This is not a fringe trend. It represents roughly half of all tech layoff announcements in 2026, making AI the single most cited restructuring justification since “COVID-19 impact” dominated 2020–2021 layoff narratives.

The layoffs are not confined to small startups burning through venture capital. Monday.com had SGD 2.8 billion in revenue and was profitable before the restructuring. Fidelity, one of the world's largest financial services firms, eliminated 800 traditional technology positions while simultaneously creating new AI-focused roles — a net headcount reduction disguised as a talent rotation. Freshworks, which serves 67,000 companies globally, cut its workforce as part of an AI automation strategy targeting its own customer support operations. Each of these companies released engineers with deep domain expertise in financial services, customer engagement, and enterprise SaaS — domains that Singapore companies across the CBD, one-north, and Changi Business Park are actively hiring for.

The cumulative effect is a talent pool of over 200,000 experienced tech professionals who have been displaced in 2026, many of whom are open to international relocation for the right opportunity. Singapore's combination of competitive compensation (SGD 140,000–280,000 for mid-senior roles), English-language work environment, low personal income tax (capped at 22%), and world-class quality of life makes it one of the most attractive destinations for displaced tech workers. But the window is competitive — London, Dubai, and increasingly Riyadh are all aggressively recruiting from the same pool.

Singapore's 55,000-Tech-Professional Shortage: Why Global Layoffs Are Your Opportunity

The disconnect between global tech layoffs and Singapore's hiring reality is one of the most significant talent market anomalies of the decade. While 205,832 tech workers were being laid off globally, Singapore employers in the CBD, one-north, and Changi Business Park were collectively reporting their highest-ever vacancy rates for software engineers, data scientists, and DevOps specialists. IMDA's projection of a 55,000-tech-professional shortage is not a forecasting exercise — it is a measurement of current, unfilled demand across government agencies, financial institutions, healthcare providers, logistics companies, and the technology sector itself.

The shortage is structural, not cyclical. Singapore's domestic pipeline of computer science graduates from NUS, NTU, SMU, and SUTD produces approximately 4,000–5,000 graduates annually. Even in a zero-attrition scenario where every graduate enters the workforce and stays, this pipeline would take over a decade to fill the current shortage. And attrition is not zero — Chinese tech giants are actively poaching NUS and NTU AI graduates, offering 30–50% salary premiums that drain the pipeline before it reaches Singapore employers.

This creates a two-front talent war that Singapore employers are currently losing on both fronts. On the domestic front, ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent, and MiniMax are extracting the best graduates before local employers can hire them. On the international recruitment front, Singapore employers are competing against London, Dubai, and the Bay Area for the same pool of globally mobile tech talent. The result is a compounding shortage where the gap between demand and supply grows wider each quarter.

Global AI layoffs break this cycle — temporarily. When Monday.com releases 620 engineers, Freshworks releases another batch, and Fidelity restructures 800 positions, the global supply of experienced tech professionals suddenly increases. But this window is narrow. Displaced engineers typically secure new positions within 4–8 weeks, with the most experienced candidates — the senior and staff-level engineers that Singapore most urgently needs — accepting offers within 2–3 weeks. The employers who reach out within 72 hours of a major layoff announcement have a structural advantage: they are competing against fewer employers, because most companies take 1–2 weeks to respond to market events. That response delay is the opportunity.

The Chinese Tech Giant Factor: Why Speed Matters More Than Salary

The talent acquisition landscape for displaced tech workers is not a two-party negotiation between the engineer and your company. It is a multi-party competition where Chinese tech giants are among the most aggressive and well-resourced players. ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei have all expanded their Singapore operations in 2026, and they view global tech layoffs as a talent harvesting opportunity. Their Singapore recruiting teams operate with standing mandates to engage displaced engineers from top-tier SaaS companies within 48 hours of layoff announcements.

The Chinese firms have several structural advantages in this competition. They have large recruiting teams based in Singapore, pre-authorised compensation bands that allow immediate offer issuance, and brand recognition that displaced Western engineers often find appealing (“ByteDance is building the future of short-form video and AI” is a compelling narrative for an engineer who just lost their job). They also have a specific strategic motivation: every experienced Western SaaS engineer they hire in Singapore strengthens their ability to build products for the Southeast Asian market, which is increasingly critical as US and EU markets become more regulated and competitive.

However, Chinese tech firms also have weaknesses that Singapore employers can exploit. Displaced Western engineers are often wary of working under Chinese corporate governance structures, particularly around data privacy, publication restrictions, and career progression ceilings for non-Chinese-national employees. MAS regulations around financial data handling make certain fintech roles at Chinese firms complicated from a compliance perspective. And Singapore's sovereignty advantage — the ability to build and deploy AI systems globally without the regulatory constraints that Chinese firms operate under — is a genuine differentiator for engineers who want their work to have the broadest possible impact.

The tactical implication is clear: speed is the single most important variable. If you contact a displaced Monday.com engineer on Day 1 and ByteDance contacts them on Day 3, you have a 72-hour head start to build rapport, communicate your value proposition, and move them into your interview pipeline. That head start is worth more than SGD 20,000 in incremental salary, because the engineer's first serious conversation shapes their decision-making framework for the entire job search. Be the first conversation, not the third.

What Singapore Employers Should Do in the Next 72 Hours

Action 1: Activate layoff-response outreach within 24 hours. Do not wait for displaced engineers to update their LinkedIn profiles or apply to your job postings. The best candidates from Monday.com's 620-person layoff will be contacted by 15–20 employers within the first week. You need to be in the first five. Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to identify Monday.com employees in engineering, product, and data roles. Send a personalised outreach message that acknowledges the layoff with empathy, describes a specific role that matches their background, and includes a concrete next step (“Can we have a 30-minute call this Thursday?”). The specificity and speed of your outreach is the signal that separates serious employers from companies sending automated InMails.

Action 2: Pre-authorise Employment Pass applications for target profiles. Singapore's Employment Pass framework is one of the fastest work visa systems in APAC, but it still requires 3–5 weeks for standard processing. If you identify a Monday.com engineer on Day 1, reach an offer agreement by Day 7, and submit the EP application on Day 8, you can have a signed employee starting by mid-September. If you wait until the “normal” hiring process runs its course and submit the EP application in Week 6, that same engineer will have started a new job in London or Berlin before your application is processed. Pre-authorise the EP criteria (salary threshold, qualifications, role description) now, so your HR team can submit within 24 hours of offer acceptance.

Action 3: Structure relocation packages that remove friction. Displaced engineers face a paradox: they need a new job quickly, but international relocation adds complexity that slows decision-making. Remove every possible friction point. Offer temporary housing in the CBD or one-north for the first 90 days (SGD 4,000–6,000/month, a trivial cost relative to the SGD 20,000–40,000 you save by hiring during the displacement window). Cover visa processing costs. Provide a relocation allowance of SGD 8,000–15,000. Include partner employment support — a service that costs SGD 2,000–3,000 per engagement and dramatically increases relocation acceptance rates for candidates with working partners. The total relocation package cost of SGD 15,000–25,000 is a fraction of the salary premium you would pay to hire an equivalent candidate from the Singapore domestic market.

Action 4: Build a layoff-response talent pipeline, not just one-off hires. Monday.com is this week's layoff. Next week, it will be another company. The 2026 pattern of AI-driven restructuring is not slowing down — if anything, it is accelerating as more companies see the stock-price rewards of announcing AI pivots. Build a standing process: monitor layoff tracker sites, maintain pre-written outreach templates for different role profiles, keep EP applications pre-staged, and have your AI/ML engineer and full-stack developer job descriptions updated and ready to share within hours of a major layoff announcement. The companies that treat layoff-response hiring as a systematic capability rather than an ad hoc reaction will consistently capture the best talent from each wave.

Action 5: Leverage the TeSA and SkillsFuture frameworks for reskilling costs. Some displaced engineers will have strong fundamentals but need upskilling in AI/ML or Singapore-specific domains (MAS compliance, PDPA data handling, IMDA AI Verify certification). Singapore's TeSA programme provides wage subsidies of up to 70% for the first 12 months when companies hire and reskill professionals into technology roles. Combined with SkillsFuture credits, the effective cost of hiring a displaced Monday.com engineer and upskilling them into an AI-adjacent role can be 30–40% lower than hiring an experienced AI specialist at full market rate. This makes the “hire for fundamentals, reskill for AI” strategy financially compelling in a way that few employers have yet recognised.

Salary Benchmarks: What Displaced SaaS Engineers Command in Singapore

The compensation dynamics for displaced engineers differ meaningfully from the standard Singapore hiring market. Displaced professionals are motivated by three factors in order of priority: speed (how quickly can I start earning again), certainty (how stable is this employer), and compensation (is the package competitive). This prioritisation creates a window where Singapore employers can hire experienced professionals at a 15–25% discount compared to equivalent candidates who are passively employed and would require a premium to switch.

Based on our placement data from the first seven months of 2026, here are the current Singapore market rates for displaced SaaS engineers by role and seniority level. Mid-level full-stack engineers (3–5 years experience) from companies like Monday.com, Freshworks, and similar SaaS platforms are accepting offers in the SGD 120,000–160,000 range, compared to SGD 140,000–180,000 for equivalent passively employed candidates. Senior engineers (5–8 years) are landing at SGD 160,000–220,000 versus SGD 190,000–250,000 passive. Staff and principal-level engineers (8+ years) are accepting SGD 220,000–280,000 versus SGD 260,000–340,000 passive. The discount narrows as seniority increases, because staff-level engineers have more options and shorter job search durations.

For AI engineers specifically, the displacement discount is smaller but still present. Engineers from companies that pivoted to AI but cut their non-AI teams often have adjacent skills — they worked alongside AI teams, understand ML deployment pipelines, and can upskill to full AI engineering roles within 3–6 months. These “AI-adjacent” professionals are available at SGD 150,000–200,000, compared to SGD 200,000–280,000 for engineers with direct AI/ML production experience. When combined with TeSA reskilling subsidies, the effective cost of an AI-adjacent hire who upskills within your organisation is significantly lower than a direct AI specialist hire.

One critical note on compensation structure: displaced engineers respond strongly to signing bonuses that provide immediate financial certainty. A SGD 15,000–25,000 signing bonus paid upon start date has a disproportionate psychological impact compared to the same amount distributed across 12 months of higher base salary. The signing bonus says “we want you immediately” in a language that a recently displaced professional hears as security. Structure your offers accordingly — front-load the certainty, and use equity and annual refreshes to build long-term retention.