AI Hiring Brief · 2026-09-04

32 frontier AI labs · 115 roles added in 24h · agihunt.info/en/jobs

Today at a glance

Contraction day, again: Across the 32 companies tracked, 115 roles opened in the past 24 hours against 132 closures — a net pullback, with Microsoft AI alone responsible for 34 of the additions and 45 of the closures, the single biggest source of churn on both sides.
ModelBest closes 20, opens 7, all sales-facing: 面壁智能 (ModelBest) closed 20 listings today, the largest closure count of any company, while its 7 new postings were entirely presales architects split across IoT, automotive, algorithm, and engineering-architecture verticals — a GTM refresh rather than a pullback.
StepFun's biggest single day in this window: 阶跃星辰 (StepFun) added 12 roles in 24 hours, more than any other company today, with 5 of them dedicated to voice models — "语音大模型算法工程 Leader" (Voice LLM Algorithm Engineering Lead), "多语种语音 AI 数据经理" (Multilingual Voice AI Data Manager), plus test and dev engineers — alongside a run of pre-train/mid-train algorithm roles.
Robotics and silicon show up together: Meta AI posted "AI Research Scientist, Robotics – Meta Superintelligence Labs," while NVIDIA added a "Senior Developer Relations Manager, Robotics and Autonomous Machines" alongside hardware roles in package layout and networking-systems architecture — robotics and chip hiring landing on the same day at two different labs.
OpenAI pairs agent safety with silicon legal: two new Safety Systems roles — "Researcher, Agent Safety, Oversight and System Mitigations" and "Researcher, Agent Safety, Training and Evaluations" — appeared alongside "Associate General Counsel, Commercial (Silicon)," suggesting both agent-risk research and chip-deal legal structuring are being staffed in parallel.

Company moves

OpenAI (769 open; 69 added over 7 days) added 15 roles against 16 closures. Beyond the paired agent-safety researcher posts and the silicon-focused counsel role, it opened a "Codex Deployment Engineer" in São Paulo and a "Manager, Applied AI Architects" in Tokyo — signs of pushing coding-agent and enterprise-deployment support further into Latin America and Japan.

Anthropic (583 open; 64 added over 7 days) added 7 roles against 6 closures. The standout is "Mega Account Executive, Meta" — a named enterprise sales seat targeting a specific customer — alongside an "AWS GTM Partnership Lead, Public Sector & Nonprofits" in Washington, DC, and a "Staff Software Security Engineer" in London, pointing to cloud-partner and public-sector sales infrastructure plus a security presence outside the US.

Google DeepMind (66 open; 7 added over 7 days) posted a "Senior Research Scientist, Gemini Omni" and a "Research Developer, Frontier AI Incubation" in Montreal — a small but pointed multimodal ("Omni") research signal.

Microsoft AI (598 open; 219 added over 7 days) drove the day's largest single-company swing: 34 added, 45 closed. New listings ranged from a "Principal Hardware Engineer TPM" and "Senior Datacenter Engineering Design Manager" in Redmond to "Senior Product Manager – Agentic Security" and a "Copilot & Agents Cloud Solution Architect" in Australia, plus a cluster of China-based product roles including "Principal Product Manager (Work IQ)" across Suzhou, Shanghai and Beijing and a "Principal Product Manager/JV General Manager" in Beijing. Sales and solution-architecture seats also opened across India, Egypt, Taiwan, the Netherlands, Malaysia and Finland — the broadest geographic spread of any company today.

Meta AI (159 open; 20 added over 7 days) added an "AI Research Scientist, Robotics" under Meta Superintelligence Labs, plus an NPI Operations Program Manager for AR/VR and Quest and a Supply Chain Capacity Engineer for its data-center/AI-infrastructure org — robotics research paired with hardware operations.

NVIDIA (564 open; 35 added over 7 days) posted a "Senior Developer Relations Manager, Robotics and Autonomous Machines" alongside a "Principal Networking AI Systems Architect" in Tel Aviv and a "Senior Package Layout Engineer – Hardware" in Bengaluru — robotics, networking and chip-packaging hiring in the same batch.

Apple AIML (292 open; 23 added over 7 days) added two "Machine Learning Researcher, Foundation Models" postings in Cupertino and a "Machine Learning Systems Engineer – Video Computer Vision" in Sunnyvale.

SpaceXAI (254 open; 26 added over 7 days) added six roles, all under its Data Center department and all tied to the Southaven, Mississippi / Memphis, Tennessee supercomputer cluster — network operations, controls, OT systems, hardware failure analysis and site reliability — continuing the buildout seen in prior days.

Cerebras (112 open; 13 added over 7 days) added six roles spanning signal/power integrity engineering, a PCB layout lead, and a physical security lead for manufacturing operations, alongside an ML systems integration engineer — a hardware-manufacturing-heavy day.

Perplexity (112 open; 18 added over 7 days) added a Virtual Events Manager and a Field Marketing Manager, both marketing seats in San Francisco and New York. Cohere (143 open; 4 added over 7 days) added three People Operations roles — talent attraction, sourcing and early-careers — even as it closed three others the same day. Scale AI and Together AI each added a small number of platform/infrastructure and sales-engineering roles.

阶跃星辰 (StepFun) (172 open; 14 added over 7 days) had the day's largest single-company addition at 12 roles, concentrated in pre-train and mid-train algorithm engineering and, notably, a five-role voice-model cluster spanning algorithm leadership, multilingual data management, testing and development.

面壁智能 (ModelBest) (119 open; 16 added over 7 days) closed 20 roles — the day's largest closure count — while adding 7 presales solutions-architect and product-manager roles split across automotive, IoT, algorithm and engineering-architecture lines, all based in Beijing.

百度 AI (Baidu AI) (452 open; 10 added over 7 days) added an "智能体架构工程师" (Agent Architecture Engineer) in its map search-and-recommendation group and a "地图商业化算法工程师" (Map Commercialization Algorithm Engineer), alongside product-manager and observability/optimization roles for large models.

字节跳动豆包/Seed (ByteDance Doubao/Seed) remains the largest single listing pool in the dataset at 936 open roles but added none today against 16 closures. 腾讯混元 (Tencent Hunyuan), 美团·龙猫 (Meituan LongCat) and MiniMax (海螺) each recorded one to two closures with no new postings. Mistral AI, Cursor, Lovable, Pika Labs, Aleph Alpha, Genmo, 月之暗面 Kimi (Moonshot AI), 深度求索 (DeepSeek), 智谱 AI (Zhipu AI), 零一万物 (01.AI), 商汤日日新 (SenseTime SenseNova) and 阿里通义千问 (Alibaba Tongyi Qwen) showed no net change today.

What it signals

The 7-day figures widen a gap already visible in the prior edition: the global labs in this dataset added roughly 516 roles over the past week versus about 61 across the 13 China-based labs tracked. Microsoft AI's 219 alone is more than three times the entire China cohort's total, and that gap holds even though two Chinese labs — StepFun and ModelBest — had unusually active individual days. The pace difference looks structural rather than a one-day artifact: most Chinese labs (Zhipu, 01.AI, SenseTime, Alibaba Qwen, DeepSeek) sat flat or near-flat for the week, while a small number of players (StepFun, ModelBest, Baidu) account for nearly all of the region's movement.

Within that movement, the two most active Chinese labs are pulling in different directions. StepFun's day reads as pure model-building: pre-train and mid-train algorithm engineers plus a concentrated voice-model team, suggesting a push toward speech capability as a distinct product line rather than a research side project. ModelBest's day reads as commercialization: it closed a fifth of its open roles in one stroke while replacing them with presales architects aimed squarely at automotive and IoT verticals, consistent with a lab trying to convert model capability into vertical-specific deals.

On the global side, the recurring theme is infrastructure catching up with model ambition. SpaceXAI's entire day was data-center buildout in Memphis; Cerebras added power-integrity, PCB-layout and manufacturing-security roles; Microsoft AI opened both a hardware engineering TPM and a datacenter design manager. Layered on top of that is a robotics thread appearing simultaneously at Meta AI and NVIDIA, and an agent-safety thread at OpenAI paired with legal staffing specifically for silicon deals — hardware, robotics and agent governance are being staffed as parallel tracks rather than sequential priorities at the largest labs.

Microsoft AI's churn — 219 added against what is likely a comparably large closure count over the week, and 45 closures in the last 24 hours alone — stands out as the most volatile line in the dataset. Combined with its unusually wide geographic spread (roles across India, Egypt, Taiwan, Netherlands, Malaysia, Finland, Japan and Australia in a single day), it suggests a company still actively resizing and relocating its AI-adjacent workforce rather than settling into a steady hiring rate, even as it keeps adding senior product and security roles tied to Copilot and agentic systems in Redmond.