Working at Airtable in 2026: The AI Pivot, the Layoffs, & What’s Left

Airtable occupies a strange position in 2026. It’s simultaneously one of the most respected low-code platforms in the world — used by 450,000+ organizations including Netflix, NASA, and Shopify — and a company still digesting the trauma of cutting nearly half its workforce. The product is beloved. The engineering is strong. But the organization around it has been through a controlled demolition.

Founded in 2012 by Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad, and Emmett Nicholas, Airtable spent a decade building the spreadsheet-database hybrid that enterprise teams couldn’t stop adopting. It peaked at a $11.7 billion valuation in 2021, rode the pandemic productivity wave to 1,700 employees, and then hit the same wall as every other overfunded SaaS company: the market corrected, and Airtable had to correct with it.

What makes Airtable’s story interesting in 2026 isn’t the layoff itself — that story is two years old. It’s what happened after. The company achieved cash flow positivity in late 2024, launched its first standalone product in 13 years (Superagent, an AI agent platform), hired a CTO from OpenAI, and is now positioned as an AI-native company rather than a spreadsheet tool. Whether that pivot will work — and whether the culture can support it — is the real question for anyone evaluating an offer.

Airtable at a Glance

The Layoffs: What Actually Happened

Let’s address this directly, because it’s the first thing anyone asks about Airtable in 2026. Between late 2023 and early 2024, Airtable cut approximately 47% of its workforce — from roughly 1,700 employees to about 900. This happened across two rounds: the first eliminated 27% of staff in November 2023, and a second wave followed shortly after.

CEO Howie Liu framed the cuts as a necessary reset for sustainable growth. The numbers suggest he was right about the business: Airtable hit cash flow positivity in late 2024 and has maintained it since. Revenue grew 27% year-over-year to $478M ARR. The company isn’t dying — it’s operating more efficiently than ever.

But the cultural impact is real and still reverberating. Multiple employee reviews written in 2025 describe a “dead” office culture, broken trust with leadership, and a lingering sense that anyone could be next. The 4.1 Glassdoor rating has held up surprisingly well — partly because many of the disaffected employees left and wrote their reviews during the exit, and partly because the people who remain genuinely believe in the product.

The AI Pivot: Superagent and the New CTO

If Airtable had simply cut costs and kept running the same product, the story would end there. Instead, the company made two moves that signal a genuine strategic shift.

First: in October 2025, Airtable hired David Azose as CTO — poached directly from OpenAI. This wasn’t a “we need someone who understands AI” hire; it was a statement about the company’s future. Azose brought deep experience in building AI systems at scale, and his mandate is clear: turn Airtable from a platform that uses AI features into a platform that is AI-native.

Second: in January 2026, Airtable launched Superagent — its first standalone product in 13 years. Available at superagent.com, it’s an AI agent platform that uses “multi-agent coordination”: a central system breaks complex requests into plans, dispatches specialized agents to work in parallel, and synthesizes results into interactive deliverables. It’s not a chatbot bolted onto a spreadsheet. It’s a new product that leverages Airtable’s deep understanding of structured data and workflows.

For engineers considering Airtable, this pivot matters. The company is hiring for roles that didn’t exist 18 months ago: ML engineers building agent orchestration systems, platform engineers designing multi-tenant inference infrastructure, and full-stack engineers building the interfaces between human workflows and AI agents. If you want to work on agentic AI at a company with real customers and real revenue (not a pre-revenue startup burning runway), Airtable is a genuinely interesting option.

Glassdoor Ratings Breakdown

Airtable’s 4.1 overall rating places it in the upper quartile among the 118 companies in our Culture Directory — roughly tied with HubSpot (4.1) and above Stripe (4.0). The surprise is how well the rating has held given the layoffs. For context, most companies that cut 40%+ of staff see their Glassdoor drop to 3.2–3.5 territory. Airtable’s resilience here suggests the core experience for remaining employees is genuinely positive.

The pattern tells a clear story. Work-life balance remains strong at 4.0 — Airtable doesn’t grind people the way high-growth startups do. But Senior Management at 3.5 reflects the trust deficit the layoffs created. When you cut half your company, the remaining employees watch leadership more carefully. Every decision gets scrutinized. Every reorg triggers anxiety. That’s the tax Airtable is still paying.

Compensation: Still Paying Well

One thing Airtable hasn’t compromised on is pay. Engineer compensation remains highly competitive:

These numbers place Airtable in the same tier as Stripe and Figma — below frontier AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI, but solidly in the top quartile for product companies. The equity component carries more risk than it did when Airtable was valued at $11.7B (current secondary market pricing is ~$4B), but the cash compensation is strong and the equity upside is real if the AI pivot works.

Benefits remain robust: comprehensive healthcare, generous parental leave, hybrid/remote flexibility, home office stipend, and an L&D budget. Multiple reviews specifically call out the benefits package as a reason to stay even when morale dipped.

Engineering Culture: What It’s Like to Build Here

Airtable’s engineering culture has always been one of its strongest selling points. The platform handles genuinely complex technical challenges: real-time collaboration across millions of bases, a flexible schema system that supports everything from project management to CRM to product launches, and now AI agent orchestration layered on top.

Engineers here own their systems end-to-end. The frontend team works in React and TypeScript. Backend services run on a microservices architecture with significant data infrastructure. The AI/ML team is now working on multi-agent systems, embedding pipelines, and inference optimization. If you’re an engineer who wants to work on problems that span the full stack and have real user impact (450,000+ organizations depend on what you build), this is a compelling environment.

The engineering team has gotten more senior since the layoffs. Recent reviews from late 2025 note that “remaining people are highly intelligent and low ego, with actual friendships and willingness to collaborate.” The company shifted toward hiring more experienced engineers, and process improvements have followed. This is common after layoffs — the remaining team is smaller, more focused, and often more collaborative because everyone who stayed chose to be there.

The Trade-Offs: What to Watch Out For

Airtable isn’t for everyone, and the post-layoff environment introduces specific risks that you should evaluate honestly before accepting an offer.

Leadership trust deficit

The 3.5 Senior Management score isn’t noise. Reviews consistently mention a “lack of confidence in leadership” and “constant sense of unease.” When leadership makes a decision, employees ask “is this the warm-up for another round?” rather than “how do we execute this?” That ambient anxiety makes it harder to take bold technical bets or invest in long-term projects.

Strategic uncertainty

Airtable is simultaneously maintaining a mature platform business ($478M ARR) and building a new AI-native product line. These often require different organizational muscles. Some employees describe leadership as “trying to catch the AI wave but lacking real vision.” The CTO hire from OpenAI should help, but organizational alignment takes time.

Valuation risk on equity

If you received equity at the $11.7B valuation, it’s underwater at $4B. New hires get struck at the current price, which is actually advantageous — you’re buying in at a compressed valuation with a company that’s growing 27% and is cash flow positive. But there’s no IPO timeline and limited secondary market liquidity.

Who Should Join Airtable in 2026

• Engineers who want to build AI agents at a company with revenue. Unlike pre-revenue AI startups, Airtable has 450,000+ customers, $478M ARR, and cash flow positivity. You’re building AI on top of real usage, not theoretical use cases.
• People who value work-life balance. The 4.0 WLB score is genuine. Airtable isn’t a grind shop. If you’re coming from a place like Scale AI (2.7 WLB) or a YC startup doing 70-hour weeks, you’ll feel the difference immediately.
• Senior engineers who want ownership. The smaller team means more scope per person. You won’t be one of 500 engineers fighting for interesting problems. With ~900 total employees and an aggressive AI roadmap, individual contributors have outsized influence.
• People comfortable with ambiguity. Airtable is mid-transformation. The strategy is evolving. If you need a fully baked roadmap and stable org chart, this isn’t for you. If you thrive in environments where you help define the direction, it’s interesting.

Airtable is not ideal for people who want organizational stability above all else, or for those who need strong mentorship from experienced managers (the management layer was disproportionately hit in the layoffs). It’s also not for engineers who want to work on pure ML research — this is applied AI, focused on shipping useful agent experiences to paying customers. For the research angle, look at DeepMind or Anthropic instead.

Open Positions at Airtable

Airtable currently has 21 open positions listed on our platform. Hiring is selective and focused — primarily in engineering (AI/ML, platform, full-stack), product, and go-to-market roles. The low headcount reflects a company that’s hiring deliberately rather than spraying requisitions. Each role has meaningful scope.

For the full breakdown of Airtable’s open roles, culture values, and side-by-side comparisons with other companies, visit the Airtable culture profile page.