AI Hiring Brief · 2026-08-05

32 frontier AI labs · 101 roles added in 24h · agihunt.info/en/jobs

Today at a glance

Apple's rare robotics push: Two of Apple AIML's three new postings are robotics-specific — "Tactile AI Research Engineer - Special Projects (Robotics)" and "Tactile Simulation Research Engineer - Special Projects (Robotics)," both in Santa Clara — a concentrated tactile-sensing signal that's unusual for a team that mostly posts on-device ML roles.
OpenAI's safety cluster: Among OpenAI's 12 new roles, "Researcher, Frontier Cybersecurity Risks" and "Researcher, Frontier Biological and Chemical Risks" both sit in Safety Systems alongside a "Program Manager, Critical Harm Operations" — three distinct frontier-risk hires posted the same day.
Silicon architects at two labs at once: Microsoft AI posted a "Principal AI Silicon Architect" and Google DeepMind posted a "Staff Silicon Architect" on the same day — chip-design hiring surfacing at both companies simultaneously.
ByteDance's sharp pullback: ByteDance Doubao/Seed added only 2 roles today against 12 closures — the largest same-day closure count of any company in the dataset, and the only case where closures this outpace additions.
ModelBest's simulation-agent line: ModelBest (面壁智能) posted two "智能体数据工程师（仿真环境方向）" (Agent Data Engineer, Simulation Environment direction) roles, one in Shenzhen and one in Beijing — a second consecutive push into agent/simulation data work.

Company moves

OpenAI: 12 new roles (53 over 7 days) split between Safety Systems research (Frontier Cybersecurity Risks, Frontier Biological and Chemical Risks) and Go To Market expansion — an "AI Deployment Engineer, Startups" in Tokyo and a "Partner Director, HCL, Wipro & Cognizant" — plus a Personal AGI/Personalization research engineer, against 12 closures.

Anthropic: 5 new roles including "Hardware Lab Manager" and "Research Engineer, RL Engineering," alongside "Product Manager, Claude Code" — infrastructure and product roles moving together, against 11 closures.

Google DeepMind: 5 new roles — "Staff Silicon Architect," a second "Senior Virologist" hire, "Research Engineer, Conversational Agentic AI," and a "Senior Product Manager, Gemini Post-Training" — chip design, bio-science and agent work all advancing at once.

Microsoft AI: the largest mover by far, 41 new roles today (250 over 7 days). Most of the volume is routine Software Engineering across Redmond, Bangalore and Hyderabad, but the list also includes "Principal AI Silicon Architect" and "Senior Quantum Characterization Engineer" — silicon and quantum hires layered on top of standard scaling, against 57 closures.

Meta AI: 4 new roles spanning "Security Engineer, Investigator - GenAI," "Research Engineer - Perception and Machine Learning," a "Product Designer, Meta Superintelligence Labs," and a hardware-adjacent "Systems Engineer, RF and Wireless" for AR/VR.

NVIDIA: 9 new roles mixing agent work ("Senior AI Agent Development Engineer"), applied health research ("Research Scientist, AI for Clinical Translatability"), and three separate developer-relations roles — research and community hiring side by side.

Apple AIML: 3 new roles, two of them the tactile-robotics pair noted above, plus a "Senior ML Engineer - Client Experimentation."

SpaceXAI: 4 new roles, mostly data-center facilities staff in Memphis/Southaven plus a "Software Engineer - Platform Core (C++, C)" — continued physical infrastructure buildout.

Cursor: no additions today, 2 closures — quiet.

Lovable: 1 new role ("Product Marketing Manager, Growth") against 3 closures — net contraction.

Cohere: 1 new role ("Head of Sales EMEA, Public Sector" in Berlin) against 1 closure — a European public-sector sales push.

Scale AI: 4 new roles, including a "Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer, (Forward Deployed), GPS" in Doha, Qatar, alongside growth-recruiting and payroll hires.

Cerebras, StepFun, and MiniMax (Hailuo) each logged a single closure today with no new postings — small trims rather than active hiring.

Moonshot AI (月之暗面 Kimi): 1 new role, "资深产品测试工程师" (Senior Product QA Engineer).

ModelBest (面壁智能): 4 new roles, including the two simulation-environment agent-data engineer postings noted above, plus "活动营销经理" (Marketing Manager) and a product-manager internship.

Baidu AI: 4 new roles spanning product marketing, MaaS internal operations, a Golang engineer in Shanghai, and a smart-assistant PM for content/IoT agents at Xiaodu.

ByteDance Doubao/Seed: only 2 new roles today, both curriculum roles for 豆包爱学 (Doubao Learning) — "语文教研" (Chinese Curriculum Researcher) and "英语教研" (English Curriculum Researcher) — against 12 closures, the sharpest net contraction in today's data.

01.AI (Yi): 1 new role ("FDE" — Forward Deployed Engineer, Shanghai) against 3 closures.

Perplexity, Mistral AI, Together AI, Pika Labs, Aleph Alpha, Genmo, DeepSeek, Zhipu AI, Meituan LongCat, Tencent Hunyuan, SenseTime SenseNova, and Alibaba Tongyi Qwen showed no movement today.

What it signals

Microsoft AI remains the outlier by scale: 250 additions over the past 7 days dwarf every other company in the dataset, and even amid heavy churn (57 closures today alone) the mix now includes a Principal AI Silicon Architect and a Senior Quantum Characterization Engineer — signs that the volume isn't purely software-engineering headcount but includes deliberate chip and quantum-hardware investment. NVIDIA (48 over 7 days), OpenAI (53), and Google DeepMind (26) are running a similar but smaller-scale cadence, and DeepMind's second Senior Virologist posting in as many days suggests its bio-risk research line is a sustained build rather than a one-off hire.

The gap between global and Chinese labs' 7-day pace is wide. ModelBest's 12 additions and Baidu's 17 are the most active on the China side; DeepSeek, Zhipu AI, Meituan LongCat, SenseTime SenseNova, and Alibaba Tongyi Qwen all sit at zero net additions for the week, and Tencent Hunyuan and MiniMax (Hailuo) added just 3 each. ByteDance Doubao/Seed's 8 additions over 7 days look modest next to its 12 closures in a single day — a pattern that reads as active pruning of its posting pipeline rather than expansion, distinct from the steadier, if slower, hiring at ModelBest and Baidu.

Safety and physical-world research are showing up together rather than as separate tracks: OpenAI's frontier cybersecurity and frontier bio/chem risk researchers, Anthropic's Hardware Lab Manager, and Apple's tactile-robotics pair all landed the same day. None of these is large in volume, but their concurrence across three otherwise unrelated companies suggests risk research and physical/hardware capability are being staffed in parallel rather than sequentially at the frontier labs.

Agent and simulation infrastructure is the one theme that crosses the US-China divide today — DeepMind's Conversational Agentic AI research engineer, NVIDIA's AI Agent Development Engineer, and ModelBest's two simulation-environment agent-data engineers all appeared on the same day, in different labs and different countries, pointing to agent capability as a near-term priority that multiple ecosystems are converging on independently of overall hiring pace.