SFO Screening Shake-Up Puts 1,279 Jobs in Play as Bay Area Cuts and Deals Stack Up

Covenant Aviation Security will lay off 1,279 employees at San Francisco International Airport on Nov. 30 — more than 1,000 of them transportation security officers — after the Transportation Security Administration declined to renew the Illinois-based company's federal screening contract, according to a state filing disclosed Sept. 29, 2026. The scale of the cut makes it the single largest workforce action in the Bay Area this week, though it may prove less severe than the headline number suggests.

Covenant said it assumes all affected employees will receive offers from the incoming screening provider. VMD Systems Integrators holds the new $803 million security screening task order at SFO, Bloomberg reports. For individual workers, the practical read is a change of employer rather than unemployment — but the transfer's terms, seniority treatment and pay structure remain unconfirmed, so the 1,279 figure stands as the official notice until the transition completes.

Biotech is cutting too, though on a smaller scale. BioMarin Pharmaceutical disclosed layoffs of 119 full-time employees, effective Dec. 4, as it consolidates its Novato manufacturing footprint. A state filing places 114 of the affected workers at the 105 Digital Dr. site in Novato, with BioMarin's primary place of business at 770 Lindaro St. in San Rafael. The company called the layoffs permanent but acknowledged some employees may find alternative roles internally, leaving the final job-loss count unclear. Novato will remain the primary drug substance manufacturing site for Adurazyme and Naglazyme; activities tied to other products will be transferred, divested or decommissioned. For manufacturing talent in Marin County, that means fewer positions at one anchor employer even as select production lines survive.

The week's counterweight came from acquisitions and funding. Pearson, the London-based learning company, agreed to acquire Palo Alto-based Workera, an AI-native skills intelligence company that has raised $44.5 million across multiple rounds. Terms were not disclosed. "Bringing together Workera's technology and AI talent with Pearson's global scale and deep expertise in learning and assessment means we can pursue our mission at a scale we could only imagine on our own," CEO Kian Katanforoosh said Tuesday on LinkedIn. The deal signals that skills-verification technology — increasingly relevant to hiring teams trying to assess AI-era capabilities — is being absorbed into larger assessment platforms.

Funding flows stayed strong across three Bay Area startups. Link Cell Therapies, a South San Francisco oncology cell therapy company, raised $30 million in additional Series A funding, bringing its total to $90 million, with Johnson & Johnson leading and Samsara BioCapital, Sheatree Capital, BMS, Kyowa Kirin, Sherpa Healthcare Partners, Western Technology Investment and the MD Anderson Cancer Focus Fund participating. HiringCafe, a San Francisco job discovery platform, secured $6.8 million in pre-seed funding led by Spark Capital. Overlord Labs, a San Jose semiconductor company building battery intelligence infrastructure, extended its seed by $4.4 million in a round led by Band of Angels.

The AI sector's broader trajectory framed the day. OpenAI is seeking at least $30 billion in new funding at a valuation near $1.4 trillion, Bloomberg reports, after postponing IPO plans — and it scrapped the release of its next-generation model, GPT-6.1 Astra, over safety concerns raised in internal testing, according to the Wall Street Journal. Anthropic's IPO prospectus, viewed by Reuters, showed a $42 billion net loss in 2025 and $518 billion in planned cloud, computing and infrastructure spending. New York's EliseAI, meanwhile, raised $350 million at a $4 billion valuation — nearly double its prior mark — and plans a second engineering hub in San Francisco.

With Covenant's 1,279 notices landing Dec. 4 alongside BioMarin's Nov. 30 effective date — and EliseAI hiring into a new hub — the Bay Area's next two quarters will test whether AI-driven expansion absorbs traditional-sector displacement.