(Yicai) Sept. 8 -- Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek has launched another major recruitment push, opening 150 engineering positions after announcing plans in June to double its workforce.

The openings fall into two main categories, namely backend development engineers and agent elastic computing R&D engineers, with a focus on experienced professionals with two to 10 years of industry expertise, according to the announcement posted on social media platform X last night by Cui Tianyi, the head of DeepSeek's newly formed Harness team, which aims to turn the firm's model capabilities into AI agents.

The large recruitment drive is driven by DeepSeek's rapidly expanding operations, including sharp increases in data volumes, training workloads, users and request traffic, said Cui, who joined the firm in March. His Harness team launched and open-sourced its first product in August.

As DeepSeek scales, its existing backend systems may no longer be able to meet future demand, creating a need for more engineers to upgrade, maintain and rewrite various backend systems, Cui said.

Founded in 2023, DeepSeek rose to prominence in the global AI industry early last year with the release of its large language model DeepSeek-R1. Its founder Liang Wenfeng said at the time that the Hangzhou-based firm had a team of just 160 people. More recent figures on its workforce have not been disclosed.

As of June, DeepSeek had 129 million monthly active users, making it the third-most-used AI application in China behind ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba Group Holding's Qwen, according to statistics from Quest Mobile.

On June 25, DeepSeek said on social media that it aims to at least double the size of every department. The recruitment drive spans seven broad categories, namely full-stack development and algorithms, core AI systems R&D, operations and maintenance, product development, model data strategy, deep learning research and corporate functions.

While expanding its talent pool, DeepSeek is also actively pursuing new funding. The startup completed its first round of financing in June, raising CNY50 billion (USD7.4 billion), and has recently initiated a second round of financing for an additional CNY50 billion, with a pre-investment valuation of CNY500 billion (USD74.5 billion), according to a recent report by The Wall Street Journal.

Editors: Dou Shicong, Kim Taylor