Demand for AI engineers in China surges 1,523%

ByteDance has advertised a salary of 975,000 yuan for one AI job.

It's more than 22 times China's average annual disposable income of 43,377 yuan in 2025.The role is the forward-deployed engineer, or FDE, and China's tech giants are racing to fill it.

These engineers work directly with customers to build AI applications and fit them into business operations.Job postings for FDEs rose 1,523% in the first seven months of the year, compared with the same period of 2025, according to professional networking platform Maimai.

It's the fastest-growing AI technical role in the report.The job postings of ByteDance in Boss Zhipin offer monthly salary ranges from 35,000 to 65,000 yuan.

Ant Digital Technologies, the technology division of Ant Group, provides monthly salaries ranging from 40,000 to 60,000 yuan for jobs requiring business-facing skills.Tencent FDE-related jobs earn from 30,000 to 60,000 yuan, while Alibaba Cloud deployment engineering jobs earn 50,000 per month.The majority of the positions pay much lower salaries.

What companies actually need are AI-native full-stack developers with experience in creating AI agents.Tencent Cloud introduced what it calls the industry's first FDE certification this year, aimed at partner engineers using its Agent Development Platform.In late August, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology urged firms to place FDE teams at customer sites.

It also told universities to train more of them.US firms are moving the same way.

Anthropic has announced a US$100 million initiative to train 10,000 FDEs by the end of 2027.A Beijing engineer who goes by Su once led an internal FDE team at a major Chinese internet company.

She says the job needs people who quickly grasp clients' needs across industries, pick the right AI tools and carry a solution through to implementation.

A monthly salary of 65,000 yuan, paid 15 times a year, adds up to 975,000 yuan.

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