AI Hiring Brief · 2026-10-02

32 frontier AI labs · 48 roles added in 24h · agihunt.info/en/jobs

Today at a glance

Robotics hiring lands at two labs on the same day: Meta AI posted five robotics/hardware roles in one batch (Reliability Engineer, Robotics; Field Service Engineer, Robotics; Robotics Verification & Validation Engineer; Systems Integration Engineer, Embedded Systems/Mechatronics; Failure Analysis Engineer, Electromechanical Hardware), while Google DeepMind added Robotics Engineer, Controls and Autonomy and Robotics Platform Software Engineer in Cambridge, MA — both labs scaling physical-AI engineering, not just research.
Silicon and post-silicon validation keeps recurring: NVIDIA's Senior DFT Engineer - Post Silicon and Cerebras's Senior Product, Test and Yield Enhancement Engineer - Taiwan continue a validation-and-yield hiring thread that has shown up across multiple labs this window.
OpenAI pairs hardware with international expansion: Data Engineer, Hardware & Consumer Devices and Physical Network & Structured Cabling Engineer sit alongside International Payroll Operations (Dublin), US Congressional Lead (Washington, DC), and Applied AI Architect postings in Bangalore and Sydney.
Closures cluster at three large labs: ByteDance Doubao/Seed (字节跳动豆包/Seed) closed 10 roles today with zero additions, Cohere closed 6 against just 1 added over the full week, and Baidu AI (百度 AI) closed 4 with none replaced — the day's heaviest pruning, spanning both US and Chinese players.
Chinese labs stay mostly quiet: of the 13 China-based labs tracked, only StepFun (阶跃星辰, +4 over 7 days), Baidu AI, ByteDance Doubao/Seed, MiniMax (Hailuo) (+2 each over 7 days), and ModelBest (面壁智能, +1 over 7 days) show any net movement this week, and none posted a new role today.

Company moves

OpenAI (838 open, +10/-8 today, +59 over 7 days) mixed hardware and international signals: Data Engineer, Hardware & Consumer Devices continues the devices build-out, while Physical Network & Structured Cabling Engineer points to physical infrastructure work. Internationally, US Congressional Lead, International Payroll Operations (Dublin), and Applied AI Architect roles in Bangalore and Sydney extend government and go-to-market reach.

Anthropic (637 open, +5/-7, +51 over 7 days) added Political Programs Lead in DC and Software Engineer, Sandboxing under AI Research & Engineering, alongside sales/finance expansion via Growth Account Executive, Startups (Dublin) and International Accounting Manager, APAC (Singapore).

Google DeepMind (谷歌 DeepMind) (96 open, +5/-1, +40 over 7 days) pushed robotics hiring in Cambridge, MA — Robotics Engineer, Controls and Autonomy, Robotics Platform Software Engineer, and a Senior Manufacturing Specialist — alongside a Staff Software Engineer, Inference Performance Optimization for GenAI.

Meta AI (205 open, +12/-5, +32 over 7 days) posted the day's largest single batch, dominated by robotics and hardware roles in Redmond and Burlingame, plus AI infrastructure network roles (Software Engineer, Network Routing; Software Engineer, Network Infrastructure) in Menlo Park.

NVIDIA (英伟达) (541 open, +3/-1, +18 over 7 days) added Senior DFT Engineer - Post Silicon and Senior System Software Engineer - Integration and Analytics, plus a Social Media Specialist, Physical AI.

Apple AIML (苹果 AIML) (298 open, +3/-1, +18 over 7 days) gained two Singapore roles — Senior Engineering Manager, Applied AI & Agentic Commerce Intelligence and Senior AI Backend Software Engineer, Digital Channel — alongside a Cupertino-based AIML - Sr Machine Learning Engineer, DMLI.

SpaceXAI (296 open, +4/-1, +21 over 7 days) continued Starlink-adjacent hiring with Counsel, Telecommunications (Starlink) in London and Sr. Sales Manager, Canada - Starlink Enterprise Sales, plus an Application Security Engineer for X Money.

Perplexity (125 open, +1/-1, +7 over 7 days) added a single Engineering Manager (Enterprise) role under Platform & Infrastructure.

Cursor (131 open, +2/-3, +10 over 7 days) added Strategic Alliances GTM Lead and Strategic Account Executive, Enterprise - Indonesia, both go-to-market roles, even as three postings closed today.

Lovable (75 open, 0 added, -3 closed today, +2 over 7 days) had no new postings today, with three closures marking continued net contraction this week.

Cohere (132 open, 0 added, -6 closed today, +1 over 7 days) saw its sharpest pullback in the dataset: six closures against only one addition for the entire week.

Together AI (78 open, +1/0, +2 over 7 days) added a single Recruiting Coordinator role.

Scale AI (192 open, +1/-2, +3 over 7 days) added a Global Head of Workplace while two postings closed.

Cerebras (115 open, +1/-1, +8 over 7 days) added Senior Product, Test and Yield Enhancement Engineer - Taiwan, continuing its silicon-manufacturing hiring thread.

Baidu AI (百度 AI) (473 open, 0 added, -4 closed today, +2 over 7 days) closed four roles with no replacements, holding its 7-day net growth to just 2.

ByteDance Doubao/Seed (字节跳动豆包/Seed) (883 open, 0 added, -10 closed today, +4 over 7 days) posted the day's heaviest closure count, erasing most of the week's net gain.

Sixteen remaining labs were unchanged today — 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), StepFun (阶跃星辰), ModelBest (面壁智能), 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) — with no additions and no closures.

What it signals

The 7-day numbers show a wide gap in pace between global and Chinese labs that has now held for multiple editions. OpenAI (+59), Anthropic (+51), Google DeepMind (+40), and Meta AI (+32) each added more roles this week than most of the Chinese labs have added in total open positions some weeks. Among the 13 China-based labs tracked, the largest 7-day net figure is StepFun's +4, and five labs show zero movement over the full week. This isn't a difference in headline scale — ByteDance Doubao/Seed and Baidu AI both carry large open-role counts (883 and 473) — but a difference in churn: the big Chinese labs are neither posting new roles nor visibly restructuring their listings at the rate the US majors are.

Robotics and physical-AI engineering is the clearest cross-lab theme this window. Meta AI and Google DeepMind both added robotics-specific engineering roles on the same day, and the job types matter: these aren't research scientist postings but reliability, field service, verification-and-validation, and manufacturing roles — the kind of hiring that follows a program moving from prototype toward deployment rather than early exploration. NVIDIA and Cerebras's continued post-silicon and yield-engineering hires point the same direction: infrastructure and hardware investment is running in parallel with, not behind, model research at these labs.

The closures tell a second story. ByteDance Doubao/Seed's 10 closures today (against zero additions) and Cohere's 6 closures (against 1 addition over 7 days) are the two sharpest pullbacks in the dataset, with Baidu AI also net-negative today. All three sit in contrast to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, which closed fewer roles than they opened today. Pruning at this scale doesn't necessarily signal headcount reduction — stale or filled listings get closed routinely — but when it outpaces additions by this much at multiple labs simultaneously, it's worth watching whether the next few editions show renewed posting or a sustained slowdown.

Finance, policy, and go-to-market roles continued to shadow the technical hiring at the largest labs: OpenAI's Pricing Operations Lead and Senior Manager, Accounts Payable - Compute, Anthropic's Political Programs Lead and Revenue Strategy & Operations (Singapore), and SpaceXAI's Starlink enterprise sales role in Canada all suggest commercial and compliance infrastructure scaling in step with technical headcount — consistent with labs that are past pure research mode and now operating as large commercial organizations.