DeepSeek launches major hiring drive for backend engineers amid rapid expansion

Chui Tianyi, head of DeepSeek's Harness team, announced on social media the recruitment of approximately 150 positions, emphasizing the need for new systems and directions. This marks a significant expansion for DeepSeek, known for its small team and high talent density, following a large-scale hiring initiative in June 2026. The current focus is on backend development engineers and agent elastic computing research engineers, with senior engineers having 2 to 10 years of experience being the primary target. Chui described the recruitment as an unprecedented demand for 15,000 headcount (HC). The expansion is driven by the need to scale operations, with data volume, machine and container numbers, and training tasks growing rapidly. Chui noted that the existing backend system may not support future needs, necessitating a rewrite. Over the past three months, DeepSeek has completed a $5 billion funding round, launched V4-Flash and V4 Pro, and increased API prices significantly. It also plans to deploy at least 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT chips in a new data center in Inner Mongolia. Market sources indicate DeepSeek is raising 5 billion yuan in its second round of financing, with a pre-money valuation of around 500 billion yuan. As of June 2026, DeepSeek's monthly active users reached 129 million, ranking third domestically, behind Doubao's 382 million and Qianwen's 167 million. According to Artificial Analysis, DeepSeek scored 36 points, ranking 15th, with Zhipu and Kimi at 7th and 9th, respectively.