AI Hiring Brief · 2026-09-30

32 frontier AI labs · 68 roles added in 24h · agihunt.info/en/jobs

Today at a glance

Volume leaders keep the pace: OpenAI (+15/-15) and Anthropic (+16/-12) again drove the most activity, together accounting for roughly half of the 68 roles added across all 32 labs tracked today.
NVIDIA prunes hard: NVIDIA closed 22 roles today against just 5 new postings — more closures in a single day than the 21 roles it added over the entire past week.
ByteDance clears its backlog: ByteDance Doubao/Seed (字节跳动豆包/Seed) closed 16 roles today while adding only 1, nearly double its net 9 additions over the past 7 days.
DeepMind Institute becomes a hiring line: two of Google DeepMind's seven new roles today — Technical Writer and Research Collaboration Lead — sit specifically under "DeepMind Institute," pointing to a distinct education/outreach arm staffing up.
Chinese labs stay quiet: the 13 China-based labs tracked added just 30 roles combined over the past 7 days versus 295 for the 19 global labs — a roughly 10x gap that held again today, with 9 of the 13 showing zero movement.

Company moves

OpenAI (834 open, +15/-15 today, +71 over 7 days) skewed toward international operations and government work: AI Support Engineer roles for Singapore, Tokyo and Toronto weekend shifts, an International Growth Lead for France, and a Strategic Delivery Lead plus Program Manager under OpenAI for Gov in Washington, DC — alongside a Technical Program Manager for Hardware Systems in Research.

Anthropic (634 open, +16/-12, +61 over 7 days) posted Research Engineer roles for "RL Frontiers" and "RL Distributed Systems," continuing its reinforcement-learning push, while Applied AI Architect and Engineer roles in Seoul and Sydney extend last week's enterprise-expansion pattern. Security and legal infrastructure also featured: Staff/Senior Software Engineer, Security Fusion Platform and Senior+ Software Engineer, Legal Tech.

Google DeepMind (86 open, +7/-1, +36 over 7 days) added a Technical Writer and a Research Collaboration Lead under its new "DeepMind Institute" line, plus a Tech Lead Manager for Model Performance and two Staff Software Engineer roles tied to the Gemini App.

Meta AI (197 open, +7/-1, +30 over 7 days) mixed AI infrastructure with hardware: a Software Engineer for Host Networking, a Capacity Engineer for Infrastructure Data Governance, and two SW Specialist roles for Wearables Interfaces Engineering in Redmond.

NVIDIA (532 open, +5/-22, +21 over 7 days) had its heaviest closure day of the group, even as new postings stayed silicon-focused — Senior Mask Layout Design Engineer, Senior Analog Layout Design Engineer, and Senior High Speed SerDes Validation Engineer.

Apple AIML (290 open, +2/-4, +16 over 7 days) added two Computer Vision & Machine Learning Research internships, one each in Munich and Zurich.

SpaceXAI (290 open, +2/-1, +19 over 7 days) posted a Recruiting Coordinator and a Manager, Critical Facilities Operations for its Memphis-area data center buildout.

Perplexity (124 open, +2/-1, +8 over 7 days) added a Business Operations Manager for Marketing and Communications and a Member of Technical Staff (New Grad) role.

Cursor (132 open, +5/-1, +10 over 7 days) opened four Strategic Account Executive/Field Engineer roles across Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea and Japan, plus an AI Deployment Manager for Japan — a concentrated APAC sales push.

Lovable (78 open, +2/-3, +2 over 7 days) added a Growth Lead for Brazil and a Tax Specialist in Stockholm.

Cerebras (113 open, +1/-0, +6 over 7 days) added a Staff Software Engineer, Observability role.

Cohere, Together AI and Scale AI each trimmed a small number of roles today (-1, -1 and -3 respectively) without posting replacements, consistent with otherwise modest 7-day totals (+7, +2, +3).

StepFun (阶跃星辰) (230 open, +2/-3, +6 over 7 days) added a 创作者社区运营 (Creator Community Operations) and 增长运营 (Growth Operations) role in Xuhui, Shanghai — community and growth-side hiring rather than research.

ModelBest (面壁智能) (97 open, +1/-0, +2 over 7 days) added a 大模型评测算法架构师 (Large Model Evaluation Algorithm Architect) in Beijing.

Baidu AI (百度 AI) (474 open, +0/-4, +8 over 7 days) closed 4 roles today with no new postings to replace them.

ByteDance Doubao/Seed (字节跳动豆包/Seed) (879 open, +1/-16, +9 over 7 days) closed 16 roles while adding a single 大模型产品经理 - 豆包 (Large Model Product Manager - Doubao), its sharpest single-day contraction among the labs tracked today.

No change today at Microsoft AI, Mistral AI, Pika Labs, 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), 01.AI (Yi) (零一万物), SenseTime SenseNova (商汤日日新) and Alibaba Tongyi Qwen (阿里通义千问).

What it signals

The global-versus-China gap is the clearest structural signal in this week's data: 19 global labs added 295 roles over 7 days against just 30 for the 13 China-based labs — roughly a 10x difference. It isn't just that OpenAI and Anthropic are large; even China's biggest postings this week, Baidu (+8) and ByteDance (+9), land closer to the pace of mid-sized global startups like Cerebras (+6) or Cursor (+10) than to frontier-lab hiring rates. Whether that reflects slower headcount growth, different posting cadences, or simply a quieter cycle for Chinese labs isn't something the counts alone can settle, but the gap has now held for at least two consecutive days.

Within the global cohort, the composition of new roles keeps tilting toward commercialization and trust infrastructure rather than pure model research. Anthropic's Applied AI hires in Seoul and Sydney, alongside Security Fusion Platform and Legal Tech engineering roles, extend a pattern of enterprise expansion paired with security hardening. OpenAI's new roles lean even further toward operations and localization — support engineers for three time zones, a France growth lead, and government delivery leads in Washington — suggesting today's growth at OpenAI is concentrated in go-to-market and public-sector servicing rather than core research expansion.

Two labs stand out for closures outpacing recent additions. NVIDIA closed 22 roles today, more than it added in the entire prior week (21), while keeping new postings tightly focused on physical chip design (mask layout, analog layout, SerDes validation) — a sign of active pipeline churn even as its hardware hiring intent stays intact. ByteDance Doubao/Seed shows a similar pattern at smaller scale: 16 closures against a 9-role weekly net. Read together, these look like housekeeping or requisition-refresh cycles rather than a pullback in hiring intent, since both labs' underlying open-role counts (532 and 879, respectively) remain among the largest tracked.

Finally, Google DeepMind's new "DeepMind Institute" line — a Technical Writer and a Research Collaboration Lead posted today — is worth watching as a fourth hiring track alongside model research, safety and infrastructure. It's only two roles so far, but it marks the first time this specific unit has appeared in new postings, and suggests DeepMind is building out education or academic-partnership capacity distinct from its product and research organizations.