While it is known that international trade and organizational practices are determinants of firm productivity, empirical evidence on their relation to each other is scarce. This paper explores credible exogenous variation in tariff reductions across manufacturing sectors to show that firms in Brazil are less structured in terms of hierarchies following the shock. Consistent with the literature on knowledge-based hierarchies, increased foreign competition reduces significantly the share of managers and the number of organizational layers on a firm. Besides, we find notable compositional movements within sectors: although similarly sized, entrant firms have fewer managers and layers than leavers. By using comprehensive data with more credible identification than previous work in the literature, our paper documents stylized facts on firms organization in a developing country, as well as contributes to the study of a potentially important determinant of aggregate productivity.