Chinese Tech Giants Boost AI Recruitment Amid Global Talent Scramble
- tech360.tv
- 4 hours ago
- 2 min read
Chinese technology companies Xiaomi and Alibaba Group Holding have launched extensive recruitment drives. These efforts focus heavily on artificial intelligence talent, reflecting fierce global competition. Both firms are increasingly positioning themselves as AI-first businesses.
Artificial intelligence-related positions now account for over 80% of Alibaba’s open roles. This marks an increase from approximately 60% during previous recruitment periods. These roles span 16 business units, including Alibaba Cloud and its chip design unit T-Head.
Alibaba recently announced the addition of seven new types of AI-related positions to its campus recruitment programme. These new roles include positions within the field of agentic artificial intelligence.
Xiaomi founder and CEO Lei Jun stated the company’s global recruitment campaign targets top industry talent, recent graduates, and interns. The official recruitment website lists over 200 available positions. These roles are across cities including Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing.
Xiaomi plans to invest up to 16 billion yuan (USD 2.3 billion) this year in AI research, development, and capital expenditure. This is part of a larger 60 billion yuan AI spend over the next three years. The Beijing-based company reported shrinking profits recently, influenced by rising memory chip costs affecting smartphone shipments.
Over 30 of Xiaomi’s current open positions are for Miclaw engineers. Miclaw is Xiaomi’s version of the open-source AI agent tool OpenClaw. New recruits are expected to work on resolving hardware constraints, such as device lag, overheating, and throttling caused by multiple AI agents making concurrent requests.
Additionally, 17 vacancies exist for engineers to work on Xiaomi’s flagship foundational model family, MiMo. More than 60 positions cover Xiaomi’s hardware offerings, including robots and autonomous vehicles. Xiaomi’s MiMo foundational models have been well-received within the global developer community.
Third-party benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis recently ranked Xiaomi’s latest closed-source MiMo-V2-Pro model as a leading Chinese model for overall capabilities. Luo Fuli, a researcher born in 1995, heads Xiaomi’s model development efforts. Luo was recruited from AI start-up DeepSeek last year.
Lei mentioned that the MiMo team has an average age of 25.
Competition for AI talent among technology companies worldwide has become closely monitored. This is due to the increasing importance of core technical breakthroughs for commercial success.
Internal personnel changes at Alibaba recently garnered significant attention. Lin Junyang, a technical lead for the Qwen team, departed, and Zhou Hao, a former Google senior staff research scientist, joined the company.
Another recent high-profile departure from a Chinese tech giant involved Wang Yunhe. Wang, the former director of Huawei Technologies’ core model development team Noah’s Ark Lab, left the company after nine years, domestic media reported last week.
Xiaomi and Alibaba have launched significant recruitment drives focusing on artificial intelligence.
AI-related roles constitute over 80% of Alibaba's current job openings, up from previous recruitment periods.
Xiaomi plans to invest 60 billion yuan in AI over the next three years, including 16 billion yuan (USD 2.3 billion) this year.
Source: SCMP