The Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek launched a recruitment campaign today to double the size of many of its teams, aiming to accelerate the commercialization of its technology and boost competitiveness.
In a statement, the company announced its intention to “expand all departments,” adding that many teams are expected to double in scale.
The initiative marks a new phase for DeepSeek as it seeks to evolve from a research-focused laboratory into an AI product company, while simultaneously preparing for its first-ever round of external funding.
The open positions span product managers, operations specialists, infrastructure engineers, and data managers. The company is also looking for candidates with expertise in specialized fields such as law, medicine, and linguistics, signaling a strong push toward developing industry-specific applications.
Read more: DeepSeek launches new AI model to escalate competition with U.S. (with video)
DeepSeek is also reinforcing the teams responsible for the infrastructure required to train and run large language models (LLMs), recruiting specialists in AI computing centers, distributed storage, networking, and training platforms.
Founded by Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek gained international prominence last year with the release of its open-source reasoning model, R1. Its performance was widely compared to the most advanced systems in the United States, despite being developed with a significantly smaller footprint of computational resources.
In recent months, however, competition has intensified within China, with rivals like Zhipu AI and Moonshot AI rolling out new open-source models that have been rapidly adopted by developers.
Meanwhile, DeepSeek’s model has lost users to ByteDance’s Doubao following user complaints regarding slow response times, service outages, and factual errors in the AI-generated answers.
Read more: Tech industry watches closely as DeepSeek prepares new AI model
The company also aims to strengthen its infrastructure development partnership with Huawei, adapting its models to Ascend processors. This strategy aligns directly with Beijing’s overarching goal of reducing reliance on technology from US-based Nvidia.
Earlier this year, DeepSeek launched a version of its V4 model optimized for Ascend processors, though adapting its most advanced models to Chinese-developed chips continues to pose a formidable technical challenge.
The recruitment drive comes as the company prepares to onboard external investors, a process that also seeks to counter intense poaching of specialized engineers. Several DeepSeek employees have recently been recruited away by rivals such as Xiaomi and ByteDance.
