# TomTom Layoffs 2026: How to Find and Hire Its Routing Engineers

_TomTom layoffs 2026 hit route planner developers again. How to find routing engineers by skill signal across Amsterdam, Łódź, Pune and Berlin, and when to call._

- Canonical URL: https://www.refolk.ai/blog/tomtom-layoffs-2026-hire-routing-engineers
- Published: 2026-11-02
- Reading time: 9 min
- Keywords: TomTom layoffs 2026, hire routing engineers, route optimization engineer recruiting, mapping engineers Amsterdam, TomTom engineers hiring

If you hire for a logistics, fleet or autonomy company, TomTom's latest cut is one of the few times people who build production routing engines come onto the market together. The trouble is that searching "TomTom" or "routing engineer" will miss most of them, and the Dutch exit process decides when they can actually say yes.

On October 15, 2026, TomTom said it will cut about 200 roles by year-end, and reports say the cuts land mainly on route planner development, sales and customer service.

## What TomTom is cutting, and who it hits

TomTom is cutting about 200 roles, roughly 6% of staff, by the end of 2026, and route planner developers are the named engineering target. The company is reorganizing into three divisions (Automated Driving, Location Intelligence and Navigation) to remove management layers.

The numbers behind the decision:

- **Savings:** about €21 million a year once the cuts are done.
- **Cost:** a restructuring charge of about €15 million in Q4.
- **Guidance:** 2026 operating margin raised to around 4% from 3%, with the charge already included.
- **Revenue:** €392.7 million so far in 2026, against €423.5 million in the same period a year earlier.
- **Market reaction:** shares fell more than 5% on the Thursday of the announcement.

CEO Mike Schoofs framed it as a bet: "We see significant growth opportunities in automated driving and location intelligence, driven by AI." Put plainly, automated driving and location intelligence are getting the investment, and route planner development sits on the side being cut.

## This is the second wave from the same teams

The 2026 cut is the second time in 16 months that TomTom has gone after the people who build route planners. In June 2025, under former CEO Harold Goddijn, TomTom cut 300 jobs and named the same three groups: route planner developers, salespeople and customer support. AFP quoted it as "certain roles in the units working on our application layer, and in our sales and support functions."

Taken together, the two rounds come to 500 jobs. TomTom had more than 4,500 employees at its 2019 peak, about 3,700 in mid-2025, and a third-party tracker now lists about 3,300.

That history matters for sourcing, for one reason: **the engineers still on those teams have already survived one cut**. They watched colleagues leave in 2025 and have now seen their function named a second time. Some will already be looking. Your target list should include the people still employed on route planning teams, not just the ones who get a formal notice.

> The best routing hire from this restructuring may be the engineer who was never laid off, just tired of waiting for round three.

## Why searching "TomTom" or "routing engineer" finds almost no one

Keyword search fails here in two ways. Job-title searches return close to zero routing engineers, and employer-name searches return thousands of profiles that are mostly noise. I ran both through Refolk's index of professional profiles (current headlines, November 2026) to see how badly.

| Query (current headline) | Matches | What the sample showed |
|---|---|---|
| "routing" + engineer title, Netherlands | 8 | Only 3 titled "Routing Engineer"; employers include Mapbox, DAF Trucks, Rabobank |
| Same query, Poland | 0 | Even though Łódź is a core TomTom engineering hub |
| "TomTom", across NL, PL, IN, DE | 3,618 | Only 4 of 25 sampled profiles currently work at TomTom; the rest are fuzzy hits like "TomtoLemon" and "Dotmom", plus ex-staff founders |

These are small samples. Read them as evidence of how badly keyword search performs, not as estimates of how big the market is. Two of the eight Dutch "routing" hits work at IHI Hauzer Techno Coating, which likely means a different kind of routing. So the real Dutch count of map-routing engineers with "routing" in their headline is closer to six.

The reason is simple. Routing engineers rarely describe themselves by their field. Their headline says "Software Engineer" and names the product, and the routing expertise is in the details: the repos they contribute to, the standards they mention, the graph problems they've worked on. TomTom describes Łódź as "a strategic map making and location technology engineering hub", and a headline search for routing engineers in Poland still comes back empty.

> **16%** Share of sampled "TomTom" headline matches who actually work at TomTom
>
> 4 of 25 profiles drawn from 3,618 matches in Refolk's index; the rest were partial-name hits and former staff.

The employer-name search fails the other way. Fuzzy matching on a short brand name pulls in every handle and company that shares the letters. It also can't separate a 2019 alumnus who now runs their own startup from a current Orbis Maps engineer. At a 16% hit rate, cleaning 3,618 matches by hand is the step where most sourcing on this pool stalls.

## The skill signals that actually find routing and map engineers

To find routing engineers, search for evidence of the work: the open-source routing engines, map formats and graph algorithms that only people in this field touch. Combine those signals with a past or current TomTom employer and you go from thousands of fuzzy matches to a list you can use.

The signals that work, and what each one tells you:

1. **OSRM, Valhalla or GraphHopper contributions.** A merged PR or an issue thread in any of these GitHub repos means the person has worked inside a routing engine, which is close to what a logistics team needs.
2. **Contraction hierarchies.** Anyone who names this graph-algorithm topic has done serious routing work, not general backend work.
3. **OpenLR or NDS.Live.** Mentions of either point to hands-on map-data work. Hardly anyone mentions them unless they've worked with them.
4. **Orbis Maps.** Orbis Maps is TomTom's newer map platform, which combines TomTom's own data with "super sources," partners and open-source projects such as OpenStreetMap. Engineers who mention it have worked on the current stack.
5. **OpenStreetMap contributions.** Because Orbis takes in OSM data, OSM experience transfers directly to logistics stacks.

The mechanism is the same throughout: these terms are specific enough that they rarely turn up by accident, so each one is a high-precision filter. A query like "TomTom" plus "GraphHopper" should return few false positives, because nobody mentions a routing engine in passing.

Building that query by hand across GitHub, LinkedIn and the open web is where most teams give up. That's what [Refolk](/) is for: you describe the engineer in plain English, it checks the repos and profiles that mention these signals, and you get back a ranked list of real people rather than 3,618 fuzzy matches.

> **Example search:** "Software engineers who work or worked at TomTom on routing or route planning, with contributions to OSRM, Valhalla or GraphHopper, based in Amsterdam, Łódź, Pune or Berlin" - [run it on Refolk](https://www.refolk.ai/start?q=Software%20engineers%20who%20work%20or%20worked%20at%20TomTom%20on%20routing%20or%20route%20planning%2C%20with%20contributions%20to%20OSRM%2C%20Valhalla%20or%20GraphHopper%2C%20based%20in%20Amsterdam%2C%20%C5%81%C3%B3d%C5%BA%2C%20Pune%20or%20Berlin)
>
> A ranked shortlist with each person's GitHub routing work, current employer and location, so you can contact the strongest matches first.

## Where the leavers sit: Amsterdam, Łódź, Pune and Berlin

Most of TomTom's departing engineers are probably not in the Netherlands. In the 2025 round, fewer than half of the 300 cuts were Dutch, and only about 1,200 of roughly 3,700 staff were based there. If 2026 follows the same pattern, most of the route planner developers leaving work in Łódź, Pune and Berlin.

What each hub does, based on TomTom's own careers pages:

- **Amsterdam:** the Dutch share of staff, about 1,200 people. This is where the search for mapping engineers in Amsterdam starts, and where Dutch exit rules apply.
- **Łódź:** software engineers "focused on optimizing our maps, services and autonomous driving technologies." A likely concentration of map and route planner engineers outside the Netherlands.
- **Pune:** "software engineers, developers and cartographers process petabytes of data every day." This is where you'll find data pipeline and map-processing depth.
- **Berlin:** teams "developing and improving our autonomous driving technologies, including the TomTom HD Map." Berlin suits autonomy companies better than delivery routing.

This changes your plan. Recruiters who go after TomTom engineers through Amsterdam networks first are working the smallest and slowest part of the pool. The Dutch settlement rules and the WMCO waiting month described below don't apply in Łódź, Pune or Berlin, so conversations there can turn into offers sooner.

> **Engineering roles open in Berlin** - [see the open roles](https://www.refolk.ai/jobs/search?family=engineering&location=berlin)
>
> Live engineering postings in Berlin, one of TomTom's autonomy hubs.

## How the Dutch exit process sets your outreach calendar

In the Netherlands, a cut this size runs on a legal timeline that pushes most Amsterdam exits into late November and December. That gives you a window to build relationships now and make offers with January start dates.

The Collective Redundancy Notification Act (Wet Melding Collectief Ontslag, or WMCO) applies when an employer dismisses 20 or more people within three months in the same UWV district. The steps that follow:

| Step | Typical duration | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Works council advice | About 4 to 6 weeks | Counting from Oct 15, advice lands around mid to late November |
| UWV waiting period | 1 month after notification | No notice, dissolution or termination agreement on TomTom's initiative |
| Settlement agreement (VSO) signed | 2-week cooling-off | The employee can undo the deal within 14 days |
| Exit target | By year-end | Amsterdam departures cluster in late Nov to Dec |

The statutory transition payment, the legal minimum, is one-third of a monthly salary per year worked. From January 1, 2026 it is capped at €102,000 gross, or one annual salary for higher earners.

> **€102,000** 2026 cap on the Dutch statutory transition payment
>
> Or one gross annual salary if the employee earns more; negotiated settlements often go above the statutory minimum.

Settlements often pay more than the minimum. One calculator site reports that the average transition compensation in a VSO is 0.57 gross monthly salaries per year worked, about 1.7 times the statutory one-third. That comes from a single source, so treat it as an estimate. The arithmetic still makes the point: a ten-year TomTom engineer in Amsterdam is entitled to about 3.3 months' salary at the statutory rate, and at that reported average would be negotiating closer to 5.7.

That's why timing matters. **An engineer who hasn't signed a VSO will not do anything that risks the payout**, and that includes resigning early to start with you. If you push for a December start, you're asking them to give up money. Pitch for January, let them finish negotiating, and keep in touch through the two-week cooling-off period.

## What to pitch, and who else will be calling

Pitch the routing problem, not the logo. Logistics and fleet teams have routing problems tied to real vehicles and real roads, and that is the strongest argument you have against bigger names.

You won't be the only one calling. Expect competition from:

- **TomTom's partners.** Microsoft runs Microsoft 365, Power BI, Bing and Azure Maps on TomTom data, and Mitsubishi Electric is an automated-driving partner. Both already work with the stack these engineers built.
- **Dutch employers already hiring routing talent.** In Refolk's index, Mapbox and DAF Trucks both employ people with "routing" in their engineering headlines in the Netherlands.
- **Autonomy companies**, which will go after the Berlin HD Map engineers first.

The way to beat them is to be specific. A first message that names the engineer's GraphHopper PR or their OpenLR work shows you understand what they do, which a generic "saw the TomTom news" note doesn't.

One more point for route optimization engineer recruiting: don't overlook the cartographers and data engineers in Pune. Logistics routing depends on clean map data as much as on algorithms, and those people know how a road network is actually built.

## FAQ

### How many people are affected by the TomTom layoffs in 2026?
TomTom announced about 200 role cuts on October 15, 2026, roughly 6% of its workforce, to be finished by year-end. Reports say they mainly hit route planner development, sales and customer service. Together with the 300 jobs cut in June 2025, that makes about 500 roles across two rounds.

### What is the best way to hire routing engineers from TomTom?
Search by skill signal, not by keyword. Combine a past or current TomTom employer with evidence such as OSRM, Valhalla or GraphHopper contributions, OpenLR or NDS.Live experience, Orbis Maps work, or contraction hierarchies. In Refolk's index, a headline search for routing engineers returned 8 people in the Netherlands and none in Poland, so title search alone will miss most of the pool.

### When should I contact TomTom engineers in the Netherlands?
Now, to build the relationship, with offers set to start in January. Works council advice takes about 4 to 6 weeks, contracts can't end for a month after UWV notification, and a signed settlement has a 2-week cooling-off period. Most Amsterdam exits will fall in late November and December, and candidates won't put their severance at risk by leaving early.

### Are most departing TomTom engineers in Amsterdam?
Probably not. In 2025, fewer than half of TomTom's cuts were in the Netherlands, where about 1,200 of roughly 3,700 staff were based. If 2026 follows that pattern, many departing engineers will be in Łódź, Pune and Berlin, where the Dutch WMCO timeline doesn't apply.

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_From the Refolk blog. More posts: https://www.refolk.ai/blog/index.md_