ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba are offering pay packages approaching 1 million yuan (US$149,739) a year for forward-deployed engineers, or FDEs. These are engineers who work directly with customers to build AI applications into their business. Job postings for the role in China rose 1,523 per cent in the first seven months of 2026 compared with the same period in 2025, according to the networking platform Maimai. It is the fastest-growing AI technical role in the report.

The headline number is the top of the range. ByteDance posted FDE jobs at 35,000 to 65,000 yuan a month, paid for 15 months a year, which gives up to 975,000 yuan. China's average annual disposable income in 2025 was 43,377 yuan, so the best offer is about 22 times that. George Wang, an HR professional at a leading AI company in Beijing, says these salaries are "only a small part of the market. Most positions do not pay that much." Companies are reorganising around AI, and they need people who can take a solution from prototype to production.

Companies also train their own. Tencent Cloud launched what it calls the industry's first FDE certification. In late August, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology urged firms to put FDE teams at customer sites and asked universities to train talent. In the US, Anthropic announced US$100 million to train 10,000 engineers by the end of 2027.

Why it matters: The AI job market is paying a premium for people who connect models to real customer problems, and companies and the state are now racing to train them.

Source: China's tech giants are paying 1 million yuan for a new kind of AI engineer, South China Morning Post