AI Hiring Brief · 2026-09-01

32 frontier AI labs · 54 roles added in 24h · agihunt.info/en/jobs

Today at a glance

A contraction-heavy day: Across the 32 companies tracked, only 54 new roles appeared today against 125 closures — Microsoft AI alone accounted for 46 of the closures and ByteDance Doubao/Seed another 17, and no single lab's additions came close to offsetting the trims.
OpenAI works three fronts at once: OpenAI's new postings spanned a "Systems Integration Engineer, Build Systems | Consumer Devices" role in San Francisco, a "Software Engineer, Safety Engineering" seat, and an "Account Director, Federal Civilian" opening in Washington, DC — hardware, safety, and government sales in a single day's batch.
Anthropic leans into deployment and international sales: Anthropic posted "Applied AI Research (Capabilities)" under its Sales org, a "Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering" role in New York, and an "Enterprise Account Executive, Digital Native Business" seat in Tokyo — deployment-facing and international roles outnumbering pure research listings today.
Meta's lone posting is robotics: Meta AI's only new role today was "Research Engineer, Robotics - Meta Superintelligence Labs" in Menlo Park, keeping robotics visibly on its active hiring list even on an otherwise quiet day.
China's multimodal and platform builds: Tencent Hunyuan (腾讯混元) added four roles — product, design, backend and full-stack — for its "混元大模型平台" (Hunyuan large-model platform), while ModelBest (面壁智能) posted "智能座舱多模态大模型算法leader" (smart-cockpit multimodal large-model algorithm lead) openings in both Shanghai and Beijing even as it closed 7 roles the same day.

Company moves

OpenAI (758 open; 59 added over 7 days) closed 10 roles today against 10 additions — a stable churn day. New postings spanned consumer hardware, safety engineering, and international go-to-market: an "Applied AI Architect" seat in Singapore, an "Account Associate - EMEA" role in Dublin, and a policy and partnerships lead for CEE and the Baltics based remotely in Poland.

Anthropic (571 open; 74 added over 7 days, the second-largest 7-day gain in the dataset) added 5 roles against 5 closures, including "Applied AI Research (Capabilities)," "Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering" in New York, and a Tokyo-based enterprise sales role — a deployment- and sales-heavy batch.

Google DeepMind (67 open; 11 added over 7 days) closed 8 roles today against just 2 additions — a net pullback — with new postings for a "Research Engineer, Frontier AI, Incubation" and a Technical Program Manager for its Antigravity data effort, both in Mountain View.

Microsoft AI (580 open; 175 added over 7 days, the largest 7-day total of any company tracked) closed 46 roles today, the heaviest same-day contraction in the dataset, while adding 10. New postings skewed heavily toward India — software engineering and product management in Bangalore, Noida and Hyderabad, and Copilot solution engineering in Gurgaon — alongside a senior technical program manager in Zürich and a solution architect in the UK.

Meta AI (153 open; 15 added over 7 days) added its only new role today, "Research Engineer, Robotics - Meta Superintelligence Labs" in Menlo Park, against a single closure.

NVIDIA (564 open; 51 added over 7 days) added 4 roles against 5 closures, including an "Architect – AI-Powered Performance Verification Automation" role and a "Senior Security Architect" seat, alongside continued supercomputing account management for the public sector.

Apple AIML (286 open; 16 added over 7 days) added 2 infrastructure-focused roles today — a Staff ML Infrastructure Engineer for pre-training infrastructure in the Bay Area and a Staff/Senior Core Infrastructure Engineer for AI Search & Knowledge Platforms in Seattle — against 2 closures.

SpaceXAI (257 open; 17 added over 7 days) added 5 roles with zero closures, all tied to its Memphis/Southaven data-center build-out: electrical reliability and facilities engineering leads, a mechanical technician, a mechanical commissioning engineer, and an AV administrator for events.

Cursor (119 open; 9 added over 7 days) added a "Software Engineer, ML Platform" role in San Francisco/New York against 3 closures.

Lovable (81 open; 6 added over 7 days) added 3 roles with no closures: a contract content designer (London/Stockholm), a Forward Deployed Engineering Lead, and a Mid-Market Account Executive for the Nordics — a product-and-sales pairing as it pushes into Scandinavia.

Pika Labs (11 open; 1 added over 7 days) added a single "Head of Finance" role at its Palo Alto HQ, a back-office rather than product hire.

StepFun (阶跃星辰; 179 open; 6 added over 7 days) added one role, "语音API产品运营（语音API）" (Voice API product operations), in Xuhui District, against 1 closure.

ModelBest (面壁智能; 134 open; 12 added over 7 days) added 3 roles against 7 closures, the heaviest same-day contraction among China's labs, with two postings for "智能座舱多模态大模型算法leader" (smart-cockpit multimodal large-model algorithm lead) in Shanghai and Beijing, plus a digital marketing and product operations specialist in Beijing.

ByteDance Doubao/Seed (字节跳动豆包/Seed; 947 open, still the largest single count in the dataset; 9 added over 7 days) closed 17 roles today, the heaviest contraction of any China-based lab, while adding 2: a MOA quality lead for Doubao's Feishu-integrated work (Beijing/Shenzhen) and a large-model algorithm engineer for AI Agent under Commercial AI (Beijing/Shanghai).

Tencent Hunyuan (腾讯混元; 78 open; 19 added over 7 days) added 4 roles against 4 closures, all for its "混元大模型平台" (Hunyuan large-model platform): a product manager, a UX/UI designer, a backend R&D engineer, and a full-stack engineer, split between Shenzhen and Beijing.

Nine more companies closed a small handful of roles today with no new postings surfaced: Perplexity, Cohere, Together AI, Scale AI, Cerebras, Meituan LongCat (美团·龙猫), Baidu AI (百度 AI), MiniMax (Hailuo) (MiniMax 海螺), and 01.AI (Yi) (零一万物) each trimmed between 1 and 3 roles. The remaining eight — Mistral AI, Aleph Alpha, Genmo, Moonshot AI (月之暗面 Kimi), 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) — showed no change today.

What it signals

Microsoft AI's week tells a story of scale paired with churn: 175 additions over 7 days is more than double Anthropic's second-place 74, yet today's 46 closures are also the largest same-day figure of any company tracked. The new roles cluster in India — Bangalore, Noida, Hyderabad, Gurgaon — across software engineering, product management and Copilot solution engineering, suggesting Microsoft is scaling out regional enterprise and customer-facing capacity rather than concentrating growth in a single research hub. A build-out at that pace naturally produces heavier pruning as postings get refreshed or reassigned.

OpenAI (59 added over 7 days) and Anthropic (74 added over 7 days) both continue steady growth, but today's specific additions lean toward deployment, safety, and channel expansion rather than core research: OpenAI's federal, EMEA and APAC sales roles and Anthropic's Forward Deployed Engineering and Tokyo enterprise-sales seats point to both labs prioritizing enterprise and government go-to-market capacity at the margin. That mirrors OpenAI's own new "Systems Integration Engineer" role for Consumer Devices — a sign product surface area is also broadening beyond software.

Physical infrastructure kept expanding quietly. SpaceXAI added 5 data-center construction and facilities roles in Memphis/Southaven with zero closures, and Apple AIML added two ML infrastructure engineers for pre-training and search platforms — both consistent with continued build-out of the compute and physical layer underneath model training and serving, distinct from the model-layer hiring happening at the labs above.

Chinese labs moved at a more measured, vertical-specific pace than their global counterparts. Tencent Hunyuan's 19 additions over 7 days and ByteDance's 9 sit well below Microsoft AI's or Anthropic's totals, and the roles that did appear were narrowly scoped — StepFun's voice-API product operations hire, ModelBest's smart-cockpit multimodal algorithm leads, and ByteDance's AI Agent algorithm engineer — pointing to targeted application and platform work rather than the broad-based scale-out visible at Microsoft AI. ModelBest's 7 closures against 3 additions, and ByteDance's 17 closures against 2 additions, also suggest more aggressive pruning of stale postings among China's labs than net headcount growth this week.