Xiaomi, Alibaba ramp up AI recruitment amid global talent war

People test the latest Xiaomi smartphones at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, February 28, 2026.

Photo: Reuters Chinese tech giants Xiaomi and Alibaba Group Holding have launched spring recruitment drives amid fierce competition for the talent driving the global artificial intelligence boom.

The campaigns come as the smartphone and e-commerce giants, respectively, look to increasingly position themselves as AI-first firms, amid growing commercial pressures in their traditional businesses.

In a Weibo post on Monday, Xiaomi founder and CEO Lei Jun said the company’s global recruitment campaign would target top industry talent, fresh graduates and interns.

Its official recruitment website listed more than 200 available positions, in cities that included Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing.

Meanwhile, Alibaba announced earlier this month that it would add seven new types of AI-related positions to its campus recruitment this year, including several in the field of agentic AI.

AI-related positions account for more than 80 per cent of Alibaba’s open roles, up from around 60 per cent during fall recruitment last year, spanning 16 business units within the group including Alibaba Cloud and chip design unit T-Head.

Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

In this photo illustration taken on February 6, 2026, a campaign for Alibaba’s Qwen is displayed on a smartphone screen.

Photo: VCG via Getty Images Xiaomi has said it would spend up to 16 billion yuan (US$2.3 billion) in AI research and development and capital expenditure this year, as part of its 60 billion yuan AI spend over the next three years.

The Beijing-based company reported shrinking profits in its latest earnings earlier this month, as rising memory chip costs dragged down smartphone shipments, the firm’s largest revenue contributor.

More than 30 of its open positions were for Miclaw engineers, Xiaomi’s version of the open-source AI agent tool OpenClaw that has swept across China’s tech sector in recent weeks.

New recruits are expected to work on resolving hardware constraints surrounding the tool, including device lag, overheating and throttling caused by “multiple AI agents making concurrent requests”.

Meanwhile, 17 vacancies were for engineers to work on Xiaomi’s flagship foundational model family MiMo, while more than 60 positions covered Xiaomi’s hardware offerings including robots and autonomous vehicles.

Xiaomi has notched up early successes with its MiMo foundational mode

原文链接: 南华早报