Disney Cuts 300 HR and Tech Jobs, Days After Hiring Its First CTO

Disney is laying off about 300 employees, most of them in human resources and technology. It is the company's third round of cuts this year. Eleven days before the news broke, Disney created a role it had never had, chief technology officer, and gave it to the former CEO of Character.AI. Disney has not linked the two. The timing is still worth reading closely.

What Disney cut

CNBC reported the layoffs on 29 September 2026, citing a person familiar with the matter. Deadline reported them first.

• Size: about 300 employees.
• Where: mostly human resources and technology roles.
• Spared: Walt Disney Studios and Disney Entertainment Television, per Deadline's reporting.
• Warning: Disney flagged the round in its August earnings report, saying it was "evaluating a variety of levers, including reductions in labor and SG&A" and was "mid-stream in this work."

Around the same time, Disney began offering early-retirement buyout packages to longtime executives.

Three rounds in one year

Josh D'Amaro became CEO in March, replacing Bob Iger, and has pushed a strategy called "One Disney" to align the company's divisions. The cuts have followed one function at a time.

Disney layoff rounds in 2026

When	Size	Where
April	Up to 1,000 roles	Enterprise marketing, consolidated
July	Several hundred	Corporate functions, Pixar, National Geographic, ESPN, TV and studios
Late September	About 300	Mostly HR and technology

The job Disney added

On 18 September, Disney named Karandeep Anand to a newly created role: Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, effective 2 October, reporting directly to D'Amaro.

Disney's own description of the remit covers enterprise technology, infrastructure, data and AI platforms, product, and engineering, working across the technology teams in each business segment. Anand was most recently CEO of Character.AI and before that spent 15 years at Microsoft, where he helped build the Azure platform. Disney said "a number of Character.AI's technical team are expected to join Disney" with him.

D'Amaro said Anand "brings a rare mix of experience across infrastructure, consumer technology and AI."

Why does the timing matter if Disney has not linked them?

Because the shape is common, and it is easier to see at Disney's scale.

The roles leaving are mostly the ones that keep the existing setup running: HR processes, internal systems, the tools each division built for itself over the years. The role arriving is the one that decides what the next setup looks like, with data and AI platforms named in the job description.

Disney has not said the new CTO will replace any of that work with AI, and nothing here should be read as saying so. The point is narrower. When a company starts redesigning how it runs, the maintenance layer and the design layer are often treated very differently: one is a cost to reduce, the other is a hire to make.

What this means for a smaller business

A business with 20 or 50 people has the same two layers, usually in the same few heads.

• Maintenance: someone keeps scheduling, payroll exports, onboarding paperwork, the shared drive and the CRM working.
• Design: someone decides which of those tasks should still be done by hand next year, and which should not exist at all.

In most small businesses, the first layer has an owner and the second does not. Nobody is asked the design question until a budget review forces it, and by then the answer is a cut rather than a plan.

Disney hired a C-suite executive to own that question. A small business does not need one. It needs one person with the time, maybe an afternoon a month, to look at the back-office work and ask what should change before a bad quarter decides for them.

Questions worth asking this month

1. Which back-office tasks take the most hours each week, and who does them?
2. Which of those tasks follow the same steps every time?
3. If one of those people left tomorrow, what would stop working, and is any of it written down?
4. Who in the business is responsible for deciding what should change, and when did they last look?

If the honest answer to the last question is "nobody," that is the gap to close first. It costs far less to plan the change than to have it made for you.

Sources

• CNBC, "Disney laying off around 300 employees in latest cuts under new CEO Josh D'Amaro," 29 September 2026.
• The Walt Disney Company, "The Walt Disney Company Names Karandeep Anand to Newly Created Role of Chief Technology Officer," 18 September 2026.
• The A.V. Club, "Disney hit with new round of layoffs after deep cuts in April and July," 29 September 2026, citing Deadline.