DeepSeek posts 150 jobs with zero AI research roles while Notion grows 30% as AI drives half its revenue

APPSO · wechat · 2026-09-08

While Meta, Microsoft and Amazon cut jobs amid AI investment, DeepSeek and Notion are hiring in opposite directions.

DeepSeek: all backend, no research

DeepSeek is hiring 150 roles, all in server-side development and Agent elastic computing — no AI research positions at all, shortly after announcing it would at least double every department.
Harness team lead Cui Tianyi explains that data, machines, training/eval tasks, agent environments and user requests are all growing explosively, forcing a rewrite of backend systems that must support tens of millions of DAUs and a new platform (DSec) to run large numbers of agents in isolated environments.

Notion: a 1,300-person 'small' software company

Notion plans to grow headcount 30% to 1,300 — roughly 3x Moonshot AI's 300 — with ARR above $600M, about half now from AI products. It runs positive cash flow with a historical 90% gross margin, takes no VC money, and is private.
The 'wrapper' curse is real: AI inference costs ate 10 percentage points of gross margin, Notion now charges Credits for background Custom Agents, and its OpenAI usage has exceeded 1 trillion tokens.
New hires include sales, support, and 'Outcomes Architects' who handle enterprise data migration, permissions, and workflow design to actually get agents deployed.

The article's takeaway: AI can compress a task to 1/10 the effort while letting a company take on 10x the work — the resulting data, requests, and system risks create jobs rather than destroy them. Personal productivity and organizational size were never the same thing.

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DeepSeek posts 150 jobs with zero AI research roles while Notion grows 30% as AI drives half its revenue

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