AI Hiring Brief · 2026-09-16

32 frontier AI labs · 84 roles added in 24h · agihunt.info/en/jobs

Today at a glance

Physical & silicon AI surfaces at three labs: Google DeepMind's Senior Software Engineer, GenAI Silicon Automation (Paris), Meta AI's Optical Engineer, Test Automation and Optics NPI, and NVIDIA's Humanoid Robot Learning Intern, Isaac Loco-Manipulation (Shanghai) landed the same day — three separate labs pushing past pure software into chip tooling, optics manufacturing, and humanoid robotics.
Agent quality and agentic safety get dedicated headcount: OpenAI opened a Model Policy Manager, Agentic Safety while Google DeepMind posted both a Research Scientist, Agents (Bengaluru) and a Research Engineer, Advancing Agent Quality — agent reliability is being staffed as its own track rather than folded into general research or trust-and-safety.
StepFun (阶跃星辰) posts the day's single largest burst: 17 new roles in 24 hours, anchored by a five-person voice-annotation leadership slate — 语音标注交付组长/策略组长/质检组长 (voice-annotation delivery/strategy/QA leads) — plus RTC transmission and SDK engineers, a concentrated data-and-infra buildout around a real-time voice product.
NVIDIA runs hot on both ends: 7 additions against 13 closures today, the steepest net pullback in the dataset, even as it keeps hiring for AI hardware sales (Global Account Manager – AI and Accelerated Computing Hardware Solution Implementation) and a Senior Hardware Security Architect.
Commercial footprint keeps widening for the top two US labs: OpenAI added roles in Singapore, Paris and an EMEA Strategy and Operations seat spanning London/Paris, while Anthropic opened an Applied AI Architect, Partnerships in Sydney — both still building non-US go-to-market capacity.

Company moves

OpenAI added 13 roles today (73 over 7 days, 10 closed today). Alongside Model Policy Manager, Agentic Safety and a Product Manufacturing & Quality Engineer under Scaling, it ran a wide commercial slate: Applied AI Engineer in Singapore, Account Director in Paris, two Customer Success Manager, Ads Solutions postings (Seattle, San Francisco), and a Capture Manager, OpenAI for Government in Washington, DC.

Anthropic added 7 roles (45 over 7 days, 6 closed today), pairing safety infrastructure — a Staff+ Software Engineer, Distributed Systems under Safeguards — with partner- and customer-facing growth: an Applied AI Architect, Partnerships in Sydney and two Manager, Customer Success roles.

Google DeepMind added 6 roles (28 over 7 days, 1 closed), spanning silicon tooling (GenAI Silicon Automation, Paris), agents (Research Scientist, Agents; Research Engineer, Advancing Agent Quality) and a Product Security engineer — three distinct tracks moving on the same day.

Meta AI added 5 roles (27 over 7 days, 1 closed). A single Research Scientist, Multi-Modal Understanding & Synthesis sits against four AI Infrastructure hires — optics test automation, Fleet AI Systems production engineering, hardware capacity planning, and SystemML networking — infrastructure outweighing research roughly 4:1 today.

NVIDIA added 7 but closed 13 (41 over 7 days). New postings mix interns (Humanoid Robot Learning Intern in Shanghai, Fundamental Generative AI Research Intern in Santa Clara) with senior hires (Senior Hardware Security Architect, a global account manager for AI hardware) — the closures make it the day's largest net contraction even as robotics and silicon hiring continues.

Apple AIML added 9 roles (19 over 7 days, 5 closed). Six of the nine are Language Engineer, Global Siri postings in Barcelona covering Finnish, Danish, Arabic, Norwegian and Polish — a concentrated Siri localization push — alongside ML engineers for Proactive and for Notifications & Personalization.

SpaceXAI added 3 roles (9 over 7 days, 3 closed): a Growth Marketing Manager, an Enterprise Commercial Counsel, and an AI Tutor - Writing role under Post-Training, pairing commercial/legal scaling with continued data work.

Perplexity added 2 roles (8 over 7 days): Commercial Counsel/Senior Counsel and a Senior Business Recruiter for Communications & Marketing.

Cursor and Lovable each posted zero additions but visible closures today — 7 and 2 respectively (5 and 3 over 7 days) — a quiet-additions, active-cleanup pattern for both coding-agent startups.

Cohere added 1 role (8 over 7 days, 2 closed): a Senior Full-Stack Engineer, Internal Applications in Toronto. Scale AI added 1 (17 over 7 days, 4 closed): Engineering Manager, Connectivity under Gen AI Engineering.

Cerebras added 4 roles (7 over 7 days, 3 closed), combining product (Senior FE Engineer, Inference Console), reliability (Kernel Reliability engineer) and physical buildout (Senior Datacenter Construction Manager, Finland/remote US).

Pika Labs added 3 roles (1 closed) — all three under its Product engineering track at Palo Alto HQ (Head of Engineer, Principal Engineer, Senior/Staff Engineer) — a small lab stacking senior product-engineering leadership in one go.

StepFun (阶跃星辰) added 17 roles today, none closed (21 over 7 days), covered above. ModelBest (面壁智能) and Baidu AI (百度 AI) posted zero additions but visible closures — 1 and 6 respectively (5 and 17 over 7 days) — Baidu's the largest single-day cut among Chinese labs today. ByteDance Doubao/Seed (字节跳动豆包/Seed) added 3 but closed 12 (7 over 7 days); new roles include 全栈研发工程师-Seed (full-stack engineer) and 基座模型安全产品 (foundation-model safety product), though closures continue to outpace additions. 01.AI (Yi) (零一万物) added 3 roles (6 over 7 days): FDE (forward-deployed engineer) postings in Chongqing and Chengdu, an LLM algorithm intern in Beijing, and a large-account AI sales role in Wuhan.

Microsoft AI, Mistral AI, Together AI, Aleph Alpha, Genmo, Moonshot AI (月之暗面 Kimi), DeepSeek (深度求索), Zhipu AI (智谱 AI), Meituan LongCat (美团·龙猫), Tencent Hunyuan (腾讯混元), MiniMax (Hailuo) (MiniMax 海螺), SenseTime SenseNova (商汤日日新) and Alibaba Tongyi Qwen (阿里通义千问) posted no new roles today. Microsoft AI is the outlier worth noting: flat today but still added 162 roles over the past 7 days — the highest 7-day total in the entire dataset.

What it signals

Microsoft AI's 162 additions over seven days against zero movement today points to batch-style requisition releases rather than steady daily hiring — a different operating rhythm from OpenAI (73 over 7 days) and Anthropic (45), both of which added roles again today and have been posting in smaller, near-continuous increments. That steadiness at OpenAI and Anthropic extends across categories simultaneously: safety/policy, infrastructure, and regional commercial roles all moved this week, suggesting these two labs are scaling multiple functions in parallel rather than sequencing hiring by department.

The clustering of physical and agent-related roles — DeepMind's silicon automation and agent-quality hires, Meta's optics and fleet infrastructure engineers, NVIDIA's humanoid robotics intern, StepFun's voice-annotation and RTC buildout — reads as confirmation that "physical AI" and "agent reliability" have become distinct, budgeted job categories across labs with otherwise very different business models, not a one-off research niche at any single company.

China's pattern this week looks more concentrated and more mixed than the global majors. StepFun's 17-role burst accounts for nearly all of its 21-role 7-day total, meaning almost the entire week's hiring landed in a single day — consistent with a scoped project ramp (its voice-annotation and RTC roles) rather than ongoing organic growth. By contrast, Baidu AI (0 added, 6 closed today, 17 added over 7 days) and ByteDance Doubao/Seed (3 added, 12 closed today, 7 added over 7 days) both show closures outpacing today's additions even while their weekly totals stayed positive — a sign of active pruning alongside hiring rather than pure expansion.

NVIDIA's net contraction today (7 added, 13 closed) is the sharpest of any company in the dataset and, paired with ByteDance's and Baidu's closure-heavy days, suggests that even in a week with broad-based hiring across 32 labs, individual companies are still running visible cleanup or reorganization passes on their req lists — a detail easy to miss if only additions are tracked.