The figure represents a small percentage of Amazon's 1.55 million total employees, but almost 10 per cent of its roughly 350,000 corporate employees.
This would mark Amazon's largest job cut since late 2022, when it started to eliminate about 27,000 positions.
An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment. Amazon has been trimming smaller numbers of jobs over the past two years across multiple divisions, including devices, communications and podcasting.
The cuts beginning this week may affect a variety of divisions, including human resources, known as People Experience and Technology or PXT; operations, devices and services; and Amazon Web Services, the people said.
Managers of impacted teams were asked to undergo training on Monday US time for how to communicate with staff following email notifications that will start going out on Tuesday morning, the people said.
Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy is undertaking an initiative to reduce what he has described as an excess of bureaucracy, including by reducing the number of managers.
He installed an anonymous complaint line for identifying inefficiencies that has elicited some 1500 responses and more than 450 process changes, he said earlier in 2025.
Jassy said in June the increased use of artificial intelligence tools would likely lead to further job cuts, particularly through automating repetitive and routine tasks.
"This latest move signals that Amazon is likely realising enough AI-driven productivity gains within corporate teams to support a substantial reduction in force," said Sky Canaves, an eMarketer analyst.
"Amazon has also been under pressure in the short-term to offset the long-term investments in building out its AI infrastructure."
The full scope of this round of job cuts was not immediately clear. The people familiar with the matter said the number could change over time as Amazon's financial priorities shift.
Fortune earlier reported the human resources division could be targeted with a cut of roughly 15 per cent.
A program begun early in 2025 to bring employees back in the office five days per week, among tech's most stringent, has failed to generate sufficient attrition, said two of the people, citing that as another reason for the size of the layoff.
Some of the employees who are not swiping in daily because they live far from corporate offices, or for other reasons, are being told they have voluntarily quit Amazon and must leave without severance, a savings for the company.
Layoffs.fyi, a website tracking tech job cuts, estimated about 98,000 jobs have been lost so far in 2025 among 216 companies.
For all of 2024, the figure was 153,000. Amazon's largest profit centre, cloud computing unit AWS, reported second-quarter sales of $US30.9 billion ($A47.2 billion), a 17.5 per cent increase that was well below gains of 39 per cent for Microsoft's Azure and of 32 per cent for Alphabet's Google Cloud.
