Amazon's SEA106 Cut: 49 Bellevue Names, One 90-Day Clock

Amazon filed a Washington WARN notice on Aug 31, 2026 for 121 workers, and 49 of them sit in one Bellevue building: SEA106, the tower Amazon calls "Everest." If you source engineers on the Eastside, this is the highest-signal pool of the quarter, and the 90-day internal-transfer window sets your outreach clock down to the day.

The filing was quiet. Amazon issued no press release. The names hit the market between Oct 1 and Oct 27, 2026, and the sourcers who wait for a headline will be reading LinkedIn "open to work" banners two weeks too late.

What Amazon actually filed on Aug 31

Amazon's Aug 31, 2026 Washington WARN notice covers 121 workers across four sites, with separations staggered from Oct 1 to Oct 27. The Bellevue SEA106 cohort is 49 people, or 40.5% of the entire filing, and it's the only site on the list with a full corporate ladder from entry-level SDEs to a VP of Legal.

Here is the shape of the filing:

The cadence itself matters. This is the sixth Amazon WARN with a 2026 effective date in Washington, and the second in a row filed with no company announcement. If you're sourcing Amazon talent, WARN registers, not press desks, are your source of truth.

Why SEA106 is the pool worth working

SEA106 is uniquely rich because it's the only site in the filing that mixes senior IC engineers, applied scientists, engineering managers, and a legal VP in one building, which is the signature of an org kill rather than a functional trim. That means adjacent teams still employed at Amazon are also destabilized, and their peers are the second-order pool.

SEA106, also known as Amazon "Everest," sits at 425 106th Ave NE in Bellevue. That address puts it in the middle of Amazon's Eastside AWS/Alexa cluster:

• Dynamo (1,500+ employees across AWS Database, ML, AI, Compute, Networking)
• Sonic
• Binary Towers (BlueShift)
• West Main
• Centre 425

The 49 cuts almost certainly are not random headcount pruning. When a filing spans SDE II through VP in a single building, the underlying event is usually a product cancellation or an org consolidation. That means two things for sourcers. First, the displaced 49 share a manager tree, which makes them referenceable to each other. Second, the surviving peers two floors up in Dynamo or across the street in Sonic just watched their friends get walked out, and their inbound-open rate for the next four weeks is materially higher than baseline.

The 90-day window is a filter, not a delay

Amazon gave affected workers 90 days to apply for internal transfers before separation becomes final. Most sourcing playbooks treat this as a wait period. It isn't. It's a quality filter.

The names still on the market on Oct 27 fall into two groups:

1. Average performers who couldn't clear an internal loop. Skip.
2. Senior specialists whose skills are too narrow to redeploy inside Amazon: a VP of Legal on a killed product line, a Principal Applied Scientist on a shuttered research bet, a Senior SDE on a deprecated service. These are the highest-value names in the cohort.

The trick is to reach the second group during the window, not after it. They're actively interviewing internally and externally in parallel. Your outreach on Oct 5 competes with an Amazon internal recruiter's Slack. Your outreach on Oct 28 competes with 40 other companies' cold emails plus a fresh LinkedIn banner.

Why "SDE" and "Applied Scientist" are near-perfect Amazon filters

Two of the job titles in the SEA106 filing, "Software Development Engineer" and "Applied Scientist," are so heavily concentrated at Amazon that a literal title search is effectively an ex-Amazon filter. This is the single most underused fact in Puget Sound sourcing.

In Refolk's index of professional profiles:

• ~15,425 U.S. profiles hold "Software Development Engineer" in their current title. In the top-25 sample by profile weight, Amazon and AWS combined account for ~60% (Amazon 7, AWS 8).
• ~1,921 U.S. profiles hold "Applied Scientist" in their current title. In the top-25 sample, Amazon and AWS combined account for ~72% (Amazon 13, AWS 5).
• Combined, that's a ~19,700-profile U.S. pool where the top region is Greater Seattle.

72%

"Applied Scientist" and "SDE" are Amazon-standardized titles that other FAANGs largely don't use at scale, so a Boolean like "Applied Scientist" AND "Bellevue" on Sept 15, 2026 returns mostly people who are currently at Amazon or were until this month.

This is the exact gap Refolk closes: instead of maintaining a Boolean cheat sheet for every FAANG's title dialect, you describe the person in plain English ("applied scientists at Amazon Bellevue, IC5 or above, laid off in the last 60 days") and get a ranked shortlist back. The title-inference work happens under the hood.

The Aug 31 filing is the sixth signal, not the first

Amazon's Washington cuts are a pattern, not an event, and the Aug 31 filing is the sixth 2026 WARN in the state. Sourcers who build a running list of every filing since Feb 2026 are working with a pool measured in thousands, not the 49 names in this week's headline.

The pattern so far:

• Feb 2026: 2,198 WA positions, including 626 in Bellevue
• July 2026: 57 tech workers
• Aug 31, 2026: 121 workers, 49 in SEA106
• Cumulative since fall 2025: 4,600+ announced WA reductions

The cadence keeps going. Andy Jassy's "leaner, AI-driven" framing is the stated rationale, and it isn't a one-quarter posture. Q2 2026 was a blowout for Amazon (net sales up 20% to $200.6B, AWS revenue up 37% to $42.2B), and the cuts happened anyway. That's not distress. It's substitution. Sourcers should assume filing #7 lands before year-end.

How to work the SEA106 list in the next 30 days

The sourcing play is a three-track sprint keyed to the 90-day window, and the tracks run in parallel from Oct 1 through Oct 27, 2026. Skipping any one of them cedes the pool to whichever competitor runs all three.

Track 1: The direct 49

Build a list of the SEA106 cohort itself.

1. Pull every LinkedIn profile with "Amazon" as current employer, "Bellevue" as location, and one of: SDE, SDE II, SDE III, Applied Scientist, Senior Applied Scientist, Software Development Manager, Senior Software Development Manager.
2. Cross-check against the SEA106 address (425 106th Ave NE) via profile bio mentions and past team affiliations (Alexa, AWS Database, Ring, Kuiper).
3. Watch for the "Open to work" banner, PTO scheduling posts, or the giveaway "grateful to my Amazon team of X years" post that lands 3-10 days after the internal transfer window closes for a given worker.

Track 2: The second-order peers

The survivors in Dynamo, Sonic, Binary Towers, and Centre 425 are the ones who just watched a friend leave. Their inbound-open rate is elevated for roughly four weeks. Message them about the specific problem you're solving, not the layoff.

Track 3: The late-window names

Set a calendar reminder for Oct 28, 2026. Everyone still on the market that morning is a specialist who couldn't be internally redeployed. These are the highest-signal names in the entire filing. Prioritize the applied scientists and the senior EMs; skip the entry-level SDEs unless you have a graduate-hire req open.

The names still on the market Oct 28 are the ones Amazon itself couldn't find an internal home for. That's not a red flag. It's a specialization signal.

For teams running all three tracks in parallel, the workflow bottleneck is usually list assembly and dedup, not messaging. Refolk collapses that step: ask for "ex-Amazon Bellevue applied scientists who posted a farewell in the last 30 days" and the shortlist arrives already cross-referenced against GitHub activity and open-web signals.

What to say when you reach them

Ex-Amazon talent from a profitable-quarter layoff will not accept the standard "we're hiring because we're growing" pitch, because they just heard the same story internally while getting cut. The outreach that works names a specific technical problem and acknowledges the substitution dynamic without lingering on it.

Three moves that work on this cohort:

• Lead with the problem, not the company. "We're rebuilding our recommendations ranker and the current owner shipped once in 18 months" beats "Series C, ex-Stripe founders, $50M ARR."
• Name the Amazon service they likely worked on. If they're ex-Dynamo, mention DynamoDB by name in the first line. Ex-Alexa applied scientists want to hear "conversational agents" not "AI."
• Skip the sympathy. They know it was a business decision. Treat them as operators, not victims.

The Aug 31 SEA106 filing is small on paper, dense in signal, and time-boxed to 27 days. Work it now, or read about the hires in someone else's post in November.

FAQ

How do I find the specific 49 SEA106 employees on the WARN notice?

Washington's WARN registry publishes filings but not always the individual names or titles. The Aug 31 filing was reported with role categories (SDE, Applied Scientist, Senior Software Manager, VP of Legal) but no roster. To reconstruct the cohort, cross-reference LinkedIn location filters (Bellevue, current Amazon), tenure signals (posts about leaving), and building-specific team names (Alexa, AWS Database, Ring). Refolk can build this list from a plain-English brief in one shot.

Is the 90-day internal transfer window standard at Amazon?

Yes, it's Amazon's stated practice for these Washington cuts. The Seattle Times confirmed affected workers in this filing were given 90 days to apply internally before separation becomes final. It means the market supply is staggered: some names surface Oct 1, most surface between Oct 20 and Oct 27. Time your outreach to the wave, not the filing date.

Are the Sumner BFI1 warehouse cuts worth sourcing?

Probably not for corporate or engineering roles. The 32 Sumner cuts are warehouse associates, service technicians, and safety specialists, which is a very different labor market from the SEA106 corporate pool. If you source industrial or logistics operations talent, the BFI1 list is worth pulling; if you source engineers or scientists, focus 100% of your effort on the 49 in Bellevue and the 35 in downtown Seattle.

Will there be another Amazon WA WARN filing in 2026?

Almost certainly. The Aug 31 notice is the sixth 2026 WA filing and the second in a row with no company announcement, following a February 2026 filing of 2,198 positions and a July filing of 57. The Q2 2026 results (net sales +20%, AWS +37%) show these cuts are not driven by distress, which means the cadence continues regardless of macro. Build a standing WARN monitor for Washington filings and treat each one as a 30-day sourcing sprint.