ByteDance accelerates robotics commercialisation with new recruitment drive

ByteDance is accelerating its push into embodied artificial intelligence, stepping up recruitment for robotics talent as it seeks to move cutting-edge research out of the laboratory and into physical hardware.

The Beijing-based owner of TikTok and Douyin is hiring for around a dozen robotics positions across hardware and software within its Seed team, the internal unit dedicated to AI research and large language model development, according to postings released on the company’s career website over the past few months.

The recruitment drive suggests that ByteDance is pushing forward its robotics ambitions from foundational research towards tangible engineering and commercial production.

Most of the openings are based in Beijing and span the entire robotics development pipeline. Among the software and data roles, the unit is seeking specialists capable of supporting end-to-end task execution, as well as building data-collection and model-training systems.

On the hardware side, the Seed team is looking for engineers capable of “full-stack hardware development” for humanoids and robotic arms.

Notably, the company is advertising for a “mass production hardware product manager” tasked with guiding robotics from “making demos” to “stable delivery”, offering a monthly salary ranging from 30,000 yuan (US$4,496) to 40,000 yuan.

ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

The hiring push comes after the Seed team lost several key AI scientists in recent months, including prominent researcher Gu Quanquan, who previously led the company’s foundational AI research efforts.

Despite keeping a relatively low profile in robotics, ByteDance has quietly built a footprint in the space. Last year, it unveiled GR-3, a large vision-language-action model designed to help robots carry out household chores such as hanging clothes and cleaning tables.

The tech giant has also strengthened its hardware push through external investments. In January, ByteDance joined a 1 billion yuan funding round for domestic AI robotics start-up X-Bot, alongside venture capital firm HSG – formerly Sequoia China.

ByteDance’s hardware ambitions come amid an intensifying global race to commercialise embodied AI. Tech giants and frontier labs – including OpenAI, DeepSeek and Alibaba Group Holding – are pouring capital and engineering resources into the sector.

Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

China has quickly become the driving force in global shipments of robots, especially humanoids. The country accounted for more than four out of five humanoid robot installations globally in 2025, driven by domestic start-ups AgiBot and Unitree Robotics, as mass production and commercialisation accelerated, according to a report earlier this year by Counterpoint Research.

Analysts, meanwhile, noted that the transition from robotic demos to full-scale commercialisation was taking “longer than expected” in China, according to a Morgan Stanley report released on Monday, which noted that the market remained constrained by “data bottlenecks, hardware reliability and limited generalisation”.

While the long-term outlook for embodied AI was still positive, analysts said short-term commercialisation progress would remain modest, projecting the country’s humanoid robot shipments to be 50,000 units in 2026 and 100,000 units in 2027.

“Ultimately, scaled deployments and repeat orders will be key indicators of commercialisation progress,” according to a group of Morgan Stanley analysts led by Sheng Zhong.

Regardless, the manufacturing and logistics sectors were “the most promising” use cases for initial applications, with demand centred on materials handling, repetitive operations and hazardous environments, according to the investment bank’s analysts.

Leading domestic component suppliers – such as Hengli Hydraulic, Leaderdrive, and Shuanghuan – stand to be the earliest beneficiaries, they added.