Fidelity Investments plans to cut roughly 1,000 workers while adding about 3,300 new employees this year, a sweeping reset that will reshape the firm’s technology and product teams by June 1. The changes will affect a small number of workers among Fidelity’s roughly 6,200 employees in Boston, and they come after days of online chatter about possible layoffs.
About half of the new hires will be in tech or product-related roles, with about 2,000 of the planned jobs already open and roughly 400 of those in tech or product delivery. Fidelity also plans to add almost 2,000 early-career workers, even as it eliminates about 1 percent of its global workforce. In a statement, a company spokesperson called it a difficult decision tied to the firm’s organizational model, saying the goal is to put the right combination of skills where Fidelity and its customers need them most.
The company said the staffing shift is aimed at moving away from an agile makeup and toward larger teams that can move faster on projects. It also said the changes are meant to create more room for early-career, hands-on engineering roles and to streamline management layers. Fidelity said artificial intelligence was not part of the equation and that the staffing review focused on employees best equipped to work on its trading and household planning platforms.
The technology and product-delivery teams at Fidelity make up about 25,000 of the company’s roughly 80,000 global workers, so the overhaul touches one of its biggest operating groups. The reshuffling also lands after a strong 2025 for the firm, and it follows last month’s announcement that thousands of headquarters employees would be expected to return to the office five days a week starting in September.
That office policy will apply to headquarters employees who are now onsite two full weeks out of every four, and it also affects workers at offices in Merrimack, New Hampshire, Kentucky and New Mexico. Employees at the Smithfield, Rhode Island, campus were not included because of spacing constraints, while in-office time for customer support phone workers will go down. A Fidelity spokesperson said the company is continuously improving its working model to better position itself to meet changing customer needs, and the next test is whether it can execute the changes without losing momentum in the parts of the business it says matter most.
