This Month's Latest Tech News in Bellevue, WA - January 31st 2026 Edition

In This Update

• January snapshot: Seattle layoffs and Bellevue resilience
• Amazon’s layoffs and Bellevue expansion
• Seattle vs Bellevue: office market split
• Olympia policy fight: SB 6229, HB 2292 and HB 2100
• SB 6026, AI rules and housing reform to watch
• AI and automation: why senior roles are at risk
• Local startups and deals: AZX, Sound Games, AIM and more
• Bellevue governance experiments: AI permitting and alignment
• On the ground: worker stories and local service impacts
• Career playbook 2026: upskill for AI, cloud and security
• What to watch next: light rail, bills and corporate moves
• Bottom line: how Bellevue workers should respond

Amazon’s layoffs and Bellevue expansion

Amazon’s January restructuring underscored the contradictions of the Eastside market: the company announced 16,000 corporate layoffs worldwide on January 28, bringing total cuts since October 2025 to about 30,000, even as it moved ahead with plans for a long-term, 25,000-person campus in downtown Bellevue.

Deep cuts, shifting priorities

State filings and local reporting showed roughly 1,400 corporate roles eliminated in Seattle and another 700 in Bellevue, part of a broader effort to streamline management and reallocate spending toward generative AI and cloud. Amazon also decided to close all of its Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go physical stores by early February, including 11 locations in the Seattle region, to focus on Whole Foods and delivery, according to The Seattle Times’ coverage of the layoffs.

“We are taking this step to reduce layers and remove bureaucracy so we can move faster and focus on the things that matter most to customers.” - Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President, Amazon, in remarks reported by The Seattle Times

Eastside buildout continues

At the same time, Amazon quietly filed new permits with Bellevue officials to advance several towers, including the first phase of Bellevue 600, the remaining buildings at the West Main complex, and renovations to a 611,000-square-foot office tower downtown. The company also moved to restart interior work at The Artise, a 25-story tower that had been on hold for more than a year, as detailed by Downtown Bellevue Network’s report on the expansion.

Internally, Amazon has indicated it will keep hiring in “strategic areas” even as it trims legacy roles, leaving Bellevue workers to navigate a market where AI-heavy teams are still growing, but with leaner, more automated org charts than the last decade’s boom.

Seattle vs Bellevue: office market split

By the end of January, the contrast across Lake Washington was visible in empty floors and construction cranes: downtown Seattle’s office market was mired in record vacancies, while Bellevue’s towers kept filling with cloud and AI tenants looking for a more predictable base.

Seattle: vacancies and policy headwinds

Downtown Seattle’s office vacancy rate climbed to about 34.7% by late 2025, roughly five times its pre-pandemic level, according to GeekWire’s analysis of record vacancies. Brokers and employers pointed to hybrid work, concerns about street conditions, and the city’s JumpStart payroll expense tax, which charges large firms between 0.746% and 2.557% on high-wage payrolls, as key factors pushing new growth elsewhere.

Those vacancy numbers came on top of elevated unemployment in the wider Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue area and more than a year of rolling tech layoffs, intensifying pressure on landlords and service businesses tied to downtown foot traffic.

Bellevue: “clean and safe” as an asset class

On the Eastside, Bellevue’s office market looked notably firmer. Amazon’s local headcount grew from under 3,000 employees a few years ago to roughly 14,300, and the company continued building out additional towers. Other recent or expanding tenants included OpenAI, Snap, Anduril, Shopify, Snowflake, Walmart, and TikTok, which occupied about 440,000 square feet and employed around 1,700 people.

“Clean and safe is everything and Seattle is not that.” - Steve Luthman, Global Head of Real Estate, Hines, quoted in The Wall Street Journal’s profile of Bellevue

For Eastside workers and founders, the split underscored a broader market lesson: even in a downturn, employers favored jurisdictions that paired Class A space with lighter-touch policy and a reputation for order over experiment-heavy tax regimes.

Olympia policy fight: SB 6229, HB 2292 and HB 2100

In Olympia, January’s legislative agenda put Washington’s startup and high-end tech jobs squarely in the crosshairs, with three bills proposing new taxes on capital gains and payroll that Eastside founders warned could tilt future growth away from the state.

Capital gains expansion aimed at startup exits

Companion bills SB 6229 and HB 2292 would expand Washington’s relatively new capital gains tax to cover profits from the sale of Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS). In practice, that would subject founders, early employees, and angel investors to state tax when their equity is acquired or taken public - precisely the upside that compensates for early-stage risk. Local tech leaders described the proposal as an “extinction-level event” for startups, arguing it would steer new companies and investors toward no-income-tax states, a concern flagged in BakerHostetler’s review of the 2026 tech agenda.

HB 2100: JumpStart-style payroll tax, statewide

A separate measure, HB 2100, would impose a 5% payroll excise tax on large employers for salaries above $125,000 a year, effectively extending Seattle’s experiment with taxing top earners to the entire state. Business groups on the Eastside warned that such a levy would raise the marginal cost of hiring senior engineers and executives just as companies were already “hedging their bets” by growing headcount in lower-tax jurisdictions.

Free-market stakes for Bellevue and the Eastside

The Bellevue Chamber cautioned that layering these proposals on top of existing federal and local burdens could undercut Washington’s edge in recruiting high-growth firms, urging members in its 2026 legislative update to track the bills closely.

For Bellevue’s ecosystem, the debate was less abstract theory than immediate signal: would Washington compete for capital and talent, or treat the sector as a static revenue source?

SB 6026, AI rules and housing reform to watch

Beyond January’s layoff headlines, state lawmakers spent the month debating how aggressively to reshape housing and technology policy - with proposals that could either ease Bellevue’s growth constraints or add new uncertainty for AI builders on the Eastside.

SB 6026: opening commercial zones to housing

SB 6026 would relax local zoning rules to allow residential projects in areas currently reserved for commercial use, a shift aimed at putting more apartments near job centers. The bill’s summary stressed that enabling mixed-use development is central to tackling Washington’s affordability crunch, especially in high-cost corridors like Bellevue’s downtown core, according to the official Senate Bill Report on SB 6026. Executives from large employers, including Amazon and Microsoft, backed the measure, arguing that adding homes near offices is more effective than taxing jobs to fund distant construction.

AI rules: guardrails without a freeze

Olympia also weighed new AI-related consumer protections, including transparency and safety requirements for chatbots and automated decision tools. In-house counsel tracked the 2026 agenda for signs of whether lawmakers would opt for narrow, risk-based standards or broad liability that could chill experimentation. For Bellevue-based startups, the stakes were clear: rules that define prohibited harms offer predictability; prescriptive technical mandates risk driving AI research to friendlier states.

Bellevue’s AI permitting as a different model

At the municipal level, Bellevue moved in the opposite direction - using AI to streamline government rather than regulate it. A pilot with GovStreamAI applied large language models to permit reviews to cut backlogs and speed approvals, a response to what planners called “intense pressure” to add housing and support businesses while relying on outdated systems, as reported by Smart Cities Dive’s coverage of Bellevue’s AI-powered permitting.

“Cities are under intense pressure to add housing and support businesses while using outdated permitting systems.” - Rabah, GovStreamAI advisor, quoted in Smart Cities Dive

AI and automation: why senior roles are at risk

While January’s layoffs looked like a familiar tech downturn on the surface, the subtext for many Eastside workers was structural: companies were explicitly reorganizing around AI-first workflows, putting a growing share of senior, white-collar roles at risk of slow erosion rather than one-time cuts.

AI as a cost-center reset

Microsoft’s latest quarterly results showed how lucrative that shift had become, with cloud and AI services driving record revenue and prompting executives to warn that automation would increasingly touch knowledge work. In parallel, workforce analysts in Puget Sound pointed out that employers were “rebalancing” toward fewer, more leveraged engineers who can orchestrate AI and cloud platforms instead of large teams writing every line of code by hand, a trend KUOW highlighted in its coverage of tech layoffs and automation pressures on the region’s job market (KUOW’s analysis of tech layoffs and unemployment).

Senior doesn’t mean safe

For mid- to late-career professionals in Bellevue, the uncomfortable reality was that seniority alone no longer guaranteed insulation. AI copilots, low-code tools, and automated testing suites threatened exactly the coordination and implementation work many high-paid roles were built around, even as demand rose for architects, security specialists, and product leaders who could integrate these systems responsibly.

“What plays into that is the concentration of the industries that we have here… you may be seeing the average higher here than you may see in other places because of just the sheer amount of concentration that we have in some of those sectors.” - Jeremy Warren, Workforce Development Council of Seattle-King County, quoted by KUOW

That mix left many Bellevue professionals rethinking their résumés: less about years in seat, more about how effectively they could direct and safeguard automated systems that were no longer hypothetical, but already embedded in their employers’ cost models.

Local startups and deals: AZX, Sound Games, AIM and more

Amid January’s wave of big-tech layoffs, a cluster of smaller deals and contracts on the Eastside signaled that capital was still flowing into focused, often AI-heavy bets - especially in Bellevue’s orbit.

AI, games, and autonomy still drew checks

Bellevue-based AZX closed a $6 million pre-seed round to build bespoke AI systems for the energy sector, reuniting several Seattle-area tech veterans around industrial applications rather than consumer chatbots. In Seattle, Sound Games raised $6.5 million in seed funding to rethink how premium games are sold and monetized, while autonomous construction startup AIM secured a $4.9 million U.S. Air Force contract - a reminder that federal dollars remained a meaningful backstop for dual-use robotics and autonomy work.

Restructurings and acquisitions cut the other way

Not every story ended in growth. E-bike maker Rad Power Bikes, once a marquee name in the region’s consumer hardware scene, saw its assets auctioned for roughly $13.2 million in bankruptcy proceedings. By contrast, Bellevue-headquartered OSR Holdings announced on January 27 that it had completed its acquisition of Woori IO, a move the company framed as securing long-term shareholder alignment and setting up a strategic review of its medical-device subsidiaries, according to GuruFocus’ report on the Woori IO deal.

A resilient - but selective - startup base

Eastside anchors such as cloud-ERP provider Acumatica and financial institutions like First Tech’s downtown Bellevue branch quietly continued investing in product and customer experience, even as funding tilted toward leaner, B2B-focused plays. Local ecosystem leaders argued that this mix reflected deliberate planning rather than hype cycles, a view echoed in a widely shared LinkedIn essay on Bellevue’s ecosystem (“Bellevue, Washington: The Startup City Defining Its Shadow”).

“Our growth has always come from alignment… it’s why companies that start here endure.” - Levi Velez Reed, Venture Partner, Startup425, in a LinkedIn analysis of Bellevue’s startup ecosystem

Bellevue governance experiments: AI permitting and alignment

Inside Bellevue City Hall, January looked less like crisis response and more like a systems upgrade, as the city leaned into technology and closer coordination with employers to keep projects moving despite broader tech-sector turmoil.

AI in the permit office, not just the cloud

City staff tested an AI-assisted permitting workflow that routed routine applications through automated checks before human review, aiming to cut processing backlogs for both housing and office projects. The experiment reflected a practical bet: if Bellevue could issue approvals faster and with fewer surprises, developers and employers would keep choosing the Eastside even as neighboring jurisdictions struggled with delays and political infighting.

A direct bridge from big tech to city hall

The city’s leadership also mirrored its economic base. A mayor who had previously managed teams at Amazon brought a product-manager’s focus on metrics and iteration to questions like transit integration and downtown activation. That background resonated with companies weighing long-term leases, including TikTok’s U.S. operation, which established a major office presence in Bellevue as part of its broader American footprint, a move detailed in the Puget Sound Business Journal’s reporting on TikTok’s Eastside hub.

“You can look out the window of our building and see the mountains.” - Warrick Taylor, VP, Snowflake, describing the firm’s decision to expand in Bellevue, quoted in The Wall Street Journal

Competing governance models

For employers comparing jurisdictions, the contrast was increasingly about process, not slogans: Bellevue emphasizing predictable timelines and partnership, Seattle experimenting with new taxes and regulations, and Olympia debating how much more to ask of the same tax base. Regional analysts noted that for mobile cloud and AI companies, low-friction local government often mattered as much as headline tax rates, a theme echoed in national coverage of why “tech companies can’t get enough” of Bellevue’s mix of environment and institutions (Hindustan Times’ summary of Bellevue’s tech appeal).

On the ground: worker stories and local service impacts

At street level in Bellevue and Seattle, January’s “tech gloom” showed up as thinner lunch crowds, busier LinkedIn feeds, and a job market where even well-credentialed engineers found themselves competing for fewer openings as regional unemployment edged above 5.1%, higher than the national rate of 4.5%.

Laid-off technologists in a saturated market

Local reporting captured laid-off Eastside workers sending out résumés at an unprecedented pace. One Bellevue-area employee, Crystal Jones, told reporters she had already applied to around 150 roles with few callbacks, saying she was scrambling to upgrade skills while employers talked up AI and automation, according to Axios’ rundown of January tech layoffs and worker reactions.

“I think it would be better to have the skills and not use them, than to not have the skills and need them.” - Crystal Jones, Bellevue-area tech worker, speaking to Axios Seattle

Service jobs feel the downstream hit

Service workers around downtown Bellevue’s towers also started to worry. At a smoothie shop near one of Amazon’s offices, employee Mary Craig said many regulars wore company badges and feared some were on the layoff lists, noting that a few slow days could matter when rent and transit costs were rising. Baristas, restaurant staff, and gig workers described similar anxieties as expense accounts tightened.

Financial triage and retraining

In response, more workers turned to a mix of financial counseling, extended family support, and short-term training programs. Reviewers for First Tech Federal Credit Union’s downtown Bellevue branch praised staff “professionalism and helpfulness” in navigating new budget realities and refinancing options, according to recent feedback aggregated on Trustpilot’s page for First Tech’s Bellevue location.

Career playbook 2026: upskill for AI, cloud and security

For Bellevue-area technologists, the most important takeaway from January’s churn was strategic, not emotional: the market was clearly paying a premium for people who could design, secure, and run AI- and cloud-heavy systems, while routine implementation work became easier to automate or offload.

Target the skills employers still fight over

Job postings from Eastside anchors and startups increasingly clustered around three capabilities: AI fluency (using and integrating tools like copilots and LLM APIs), back-end and cloud engineering (Python, APIs, databases, DevOps), and cybersecurity (especially in cloud environments). Front-end-only roles and narrow operational jobs were harder to defend as organizations looked for smaller teams that could orchestrate powerful platforms rather than build every component from scratch.

Part-time upskilling that fits a layoff reality

For workers juggling job searches, family obligations, or contract gigs, full-time, $15,000-plus bootcamps were often unrealistic. That made lower-cost, part-time programs such as Nucamp’s online coding bootcamps more relevant: most required roughly 10-20 hours per week and included structured instruction plus career services, rather than leaving learners to self-paced videos.

In practice, that meant a laid-off front-end engineer could pivot into Python and DevOps in four months; an IT support professional could reposition into security in just over three; and a former PM or founder could use structured AI training to test a lean SaaS idea tailored to Bellevue’s enterprise tenants.

What to watch next: light rail, bills and corporate moves

Over the next few months, Eastside workers and founders will be watching a handful of concrete milestones that could tilt the region’s tech map more firmly toward - or away from - Bellevue.

March 28: Light rail reshapes the talent radius

The opening of light rail across Lake Washington on March 28, 2026 is set to compress commute times between downtown Seattle and Bellevue. For employers, that could expand the effective hiring radius without adding office space; for workers, it widens the set of realistic job options on both sides of the lake. How quickly companies adjust in-office expectations once trains are running will be a key signal for hybrid policy and future leasing.

Legislative clock on taxes and zoning

In Olympia, the fate of SB 6229, HB 2292, and HB 2100 will clarify whether Washington intends to lean into taxing startup exits and high-earner payrolls, or back off in favor of competitiveness. At the same time, implementation details for SB 6026 - if it passes - will determine how fast cities like Bellevue can convert underused commercial areas into mixed-use districts instead of vacant lots. Business leaders have warned that missteps could deepen concerns about an economic slowdown already visible in tech-heavy metros, as described in national coverage of Seattle’s tech “gloom” and its spillover risks from outlets such as The Black Chronicle’s report on slowdown worries.

Headcount moves and quiet hiring channels

Finally, watch whether Amazon, TikTok, OpenAI, and other Eastside tenants add net new roles in Bellevue, simply refill backfills, or increasingly route fresh headcount to lower-tax states. Many of those decisions show up first at meetups and niche conferences rather than in press releases; statewide calendars such as Vanguard X’s guide to 2026 Washington tech events will be one of the more useful places to spot which teams are still quietly hiring.

Bottom line: how Bellevue workers should respond

For Bellevue’s tech workers, January’s split-screen economy was both a warning and an opportunity. Seattle’s long-running “prosperity bomb” showed signs of fizzling, as one regional analysis put it, raising questions about how much longer the old model of taxing a booming core can hold (The Daily Chronicle’s look at Seattle’s shifting fortunes). Bellevue, by contrast, looked like a relative safe harbor - but not a guaranteed one.

Treat Bellevue as launchpad, not lifeboat

The safest assumption for 2026 is continued volatility. Even in a city adding office towers and AI tenants, roles will keep evolving as employers lean into automation and leaner teams. For individuals, that argues for doubling down on AI literacy, cloud and back-end skills, and cybersecurity, while staying open to hybrid or remote work with out-of-state firms. Affordable, part-time bootcamps, university extensions, and targeted certificates are more than résumé padding; they are ways to signal you can operate in the new stack, not just the old one.

Follow the money, and the policy

On the capital side, investors are still betting on the Eastside’s fundamentals. A January multifamily update for Washington highlighted how institutional capital continues to differentiate between markets that add housing and jobs and those that don’t, with Bellevue repeatedly cited as a focal point for new investment (HFO’s Washington State multifamily snapshot). For workers, the implication is clear: keep one eye on tax policy and zoning decisions in Olympia, because they will shape which employers keep expanding locally.

The bottom line: assume that neither your job nor your city is static. Use this period to retool into roles that direct and secure AI-driven systems, deepen your local network on the Eastside, and stay engaged in debates over how much Washington can ask of its tech base before it starts to look elsewhere. Bellevue is well-positioned - but your best hedge is making sure your own skills are, too.