AI Hiring Brief · 2026-08-22

32 frontier AI labs · 126 roles added in 24h · agihunt.info/en/jobs

Today at a glance

OpenAI pushes into physical hardware: two new Technical Program Manager roles — Sensors and Actuators — sit inside Research, alongside a Product Manufacturing Engineer - PCBA in Scaling and a Machine Learning Engineer, Multimodal Perception and Authentication in Consumer Devices, the clearest device/robotics signal in today's data.
Microsoft AI grows silicon and quantum teams while shedding headcount elsewhere: 41 additions today (224 over 7 days) include a Senior Silicon Validation Engineer in India and four quantum-engineering postings split between Redmond and Copenhagen, even as 51 closures today nearly offset the day's adds.
Anthropic pairs a security build-out with APAC sales expansion: two Incident Manager - Detection & Response roles (Zürich and the US) and three Safeguards/Trust & Safety postings on cyber harms and vulnerability disclosure run alongside new Account Executive and Partner Account Manager hires in Bangalore, Singapore and Munich.
Data-center construction keeps compounding: SpaceXAI added 5 roles today (45 over 7 days) almost entirely tied to a Memphis, Tennessee build-out (Construction Manager, Sr. Electrical Construction Project Engineer), while Anthropic separately added a Data Center Supply Planning Lead and a Senior Manufacturing Quality Engineer, Data Center Power & Cooling.
China's tracked labs stay largely flat: DeepSeek (深度求索), Zhipu AI (智谱 AI), SenseTime SenseNova (商汤日日新) and Alibaba Tongyi Qwen (阿里通义千问) posted zero net change over the past 7 days, and Moonshot AI (月之暗面 Kimi)'s only adds today were legal and investor-relations roles rather than engineering.

Company moves

OpenAI: 18 additions today (67 over 7 days), 6 closures. New postings split between hardware/robotics (Technical Program Manager, Sensors; Technical Program Manager, Actuators; Product Manufacturing Engineer - PCBA) and APAC commercial expansion (Account Director, Startups (Mandarin-Speaking) in Singapore; Partner Director roles in Sydney and Seoul; Senior Commercial Counsel, APAC).

Anthropic: 24 additions today (109 over 7 days, the week's largest gain), 6 closures. The mix spans security/incident response, safeguards policy on cyber harms and vulnerability disclosure, compute/data-center roles (Data Center Supply Planning Lead, Senior Manufacturing Quality Engineer, Data Center Power & Cooling), and a wave of Sales hires across Munich, Bangalore and Singapore.

Google DeepMind: 9 additions (19 over 7 days), but 7 closures today — a near wash. New roles include Research Scientist, Human Data, Robotics in London and Software Engineer, Accelerators Software/Hardware Co-design, alongside Research Scientist, FSF Risk Modeling and Governance — robotics and hardware co-design paired with frontier-safety governance.

Microsoft AI: The largest single-day volume in the set — 41 additions, 224 over 7 days, but also 51 closures today, roughly offsetting the day's adds. Beyond routine Software Engineering bulk in Redmond, Silicon Engineering (Senior Silicon Validation Engineer, India) and Quantum Engineering (Principal Researcher - Quantum in Copenhagen; two Quantum Systems engineer roles in Redmond) stand out.

Meta AI: A narrow 2 additions today (16 over 7 days), both in AI Infrastructure — Software Engineer, SystemML - AI Networking and Production Systems Engineer, Fleet AI Systems.

NVIDIA (英伟达): 6 additions today (31 over 7 days), including Solutions Architect roles in Taiwan and Singapore and a Research Engineer, Interactive World Models in Santa Clara — GTM/solutions roles outnumber research this round.

Apple AIML (苹果 AIML): 6 additions (25 over 7 days), concentrated in Machine Learning and AI, including a Senior Machine Learning Research Engineer, Siri Speech and two Data Scientist/analytics roles.

SpaceXAI: 5 additions today but 45 over the week, almost all tied to Data Center construction in Memphis, Tennessee (Construction Manager, Sr. Construction Project Manager – Electrical Infrastructure, Energy & Infrastructure Counsel), plus an AI Tutor - Hindi role under Human Data.

Cohere: 1 addition today (13 over 7 days) — a Senior Full-Stack Engineer (North Admin) for its Agentic Platform, based across Toronto, Montreal and New York.

Scale AI: 2 additions today (5 over 7 days) — a Data Acquisition Lead, Frontier Environments and an Engagement Manager, Public Sector in Omaha.

Cerebras: 1 addition today (6 over 7 days) — a Senior Operations Manager in Hardware Operations.

Cursor: 2 closures today against only 2 additions over the full week — a small net pullback.

Perplexity, Together AI, Lovable, StepFun (阶跃星辰), Tencent Hunyuan (腾讯混元), MiniMax (Hailuo) (MiniMax 海螺): each added a handful of roles over 7 days (4, 7, 4, 4, 3 and 4 respectively) with none today and no new-role detail surfaced.

Baidu AI (百度 AI): 2 additions today (18 over 7 days) — a compute-operations solution architect and a cloud/large-model enterprise sales role, both pointing at commercial compute push.

ByteDance Doubao/Seed (字节跳动豆包/Seed): despite the largest open board in the dataset at 967, only 2 additions today (27 over 7 days) — a Seed visual-aesthetics creation lead (3D/image/design) and a Doubao e-commerce/life-services transaction operations expert — modest, product-facing hiring against a huge existing base.

Moonshot AI (月之暗面 Kimi): 4 additions today but only 5 over 7 days and 2 closures. All four new roles are legal, investor relations, strategic-investment and talent/org-architecture positions — not engineering.

ModelBest (面壁智能): 1 addition today (7 over 7 days), 2 closures — an internal-audit/internal-control specialist for the large-model industry, based in Beijing.

Meituan LongCat (美团·龙猫): 1 addition today (2 over 7 days) — an AI R&D Efficiency Expert for its LongCat foundation model, spanning Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.

01.AI (Yi) (零一万物): 1 addition today (5 over 7 days) — an AI consulting and Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) specialist role in Shanghai.

Mistral AI, Pika Labs, Aleph Alpha, Genmo, DeepSeek (深度求索), Zhipu AI (智谱 AI), SenseTime SenseNova (商汤日日新) and Alibaba Tongyi Qwen (阿里通义千问) posted no net change today or over the past 7 days.

What it signals

The 7-day totals make the global-versus-China gap explicit: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Microsoft AI, Meta AI, NVIDIA, Apple AIML, SpaceXAI, Perplexity, Cursor, Lovable, Cohere, Together AI, Scale AI and Cerebras added roughly 577 roles combined over the week, while the thirteen China-based labs in the set added roughly 75 — a lopsided pace even accounting for the smaller number of China labs tracked. Only ByteDance (27), Baidu (18) and ModelBest (7) posted double-digit or near-double-digit weekly gains among China labs, and half the China cohort — DeepSeek, Zhipu AI, SenseTime SenseNova and Alibaba Tongyi Qwen — recorded zero net movement for the full week.

Physical infrastructure is the throughline across the biggest global movers. OpenAI's Sensors/Actuators TPM pair and PCBA manufacturing engineer point at continued device work inside Consumer Devices and Scaling; Google DeepMind is simultaneously hiring for robotics human-data collection and hardware/software accelerator co-design; Microsoft AI is adding both silicon-validation and quantum-engineering headcount even while closing roles elsewhere; and Anthropic and SpaceXAI are both actively staffing data-center construction and power/cooling roles — Anthropic's in supply planning and manufacturing quality, SpaceXAI's concentrated in a Memphis build-out. Read together, the frontier labs are hiring for the physical layer — chips, power, cooling, sensors — at the same time as they staff safety and go-to-market functions, not sequentially.

Microsoft AI's numbers also illustrate a different kind of growth than Anthropic's: Microsoft's 224 additions over 7 days come with 51 closures in a single day, a churn rate that suggests role backfill and reorganization alongside genuine expansion. Anthropic's 109 additions over the same window carry only 6 closures today, a comparatively clean net build — consistent with a lab still in an unambiguous headcount-growth phase rather than one cycling roles.

On the China side, the roles that did appear skew toward commercialization and governance rather than model research: Baidu's compute-operations architect and enterprise cloud/large-model sales hire, ByteDance's e-commerce-linked transaction operations role, and Moonshot's cluster of legal, investor-relations and strategic-investment postings all point toward monetization and corporate-structure work rather than frontier engineering. That is a different hiring signature from the sensors-actuators-quantum-silicon cluster showing up at the US labs this week.