Chinese humanoid robotics company UBTECH has issued a global recruitment notice for a chief embodied intelligence scientist, offering an annual compensation package ranging from 15 million yuan to 124 million yuan, equivalent to approximately $2.18 million to $18 million at current exchange rates. The Hong Kong-listed company confirmed the offer to the Global Times, with the upper figure representing one of the highest salary packages on record in China’s robotics sector and reportedly placing it on par with compensation levels offered to top scientists at global technology companies including OpenAI and Meta.
To contextualise the scale of the offer, 124 million yuan is equivalent to the annual fiscal revenue of a medium-sized Chinese township or a small county-level city. By comparison, Wang Xingxing, the founder, chief executive, and chief technology officer of Unitree Robotics, another prominent Chinese humanoid robot company, drew an annual salary of 2.5 million yuan according to that company’s initial public offering prospectus. UBTECH’s compensation package will be structured as a combination of cash, benefits, and equity. The company described the role as one that will define its technology roadmap across the fields of humanoid intelligence and embodied intelligence, with responsibilities including leading research into vision-language-action models, foundational robot models, and manipulation and dexterous skill learning. The position is also expected to drive the commercialisation of cutting-edge embodied intelligence technologies across applications in intelligent manufacturing, commercial services, and home companionship. Alongside the chief scientist role, UBTECH also opened a series of senior technical positions including reinforcement learning algorithm engineers, hardware engineers, mechanical engineers, and software developers.
The recruitment push reflects a broader acceleration in China’s humanoid robotics and embodied intelligence sector, which has been included in the Government Work Report for two consecutive years and is widely regarded as entering a critical phase of technological and commercial development. Wang Peng, an associate research fellow at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times that the industry still faces significant challenges in core algorithms, foundational models, and dexterous manipulation, and that securing top talent can meaningfully shorten development cycles and reduce the cost of experimentation at scale. UBTECH is not alone in intensifying its talent acquisition efforts. Tesla issued a specialised recruitment notice for its Optimus humanoid robot programme on March 25, seeking more than 80 professionals across artificial intelligence, engineering, and manufacturing, with the company stating its goal of achieving large-scale mass production of Optimus as quickly as possible. The competition for the world’s best robotics minds is, by all indications, growing sharper by the month.
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