A Chinese humanoid (human-shaped robot) corporations has moved to secure top talent by offering annual pay packages worth tens of billions of won. As China designates embodied intelligence (Embodied AI) as a national strategic industry and nurtures it, with global big tech (large technology corporations) such as Tesla joining the race, the battle for technological leadership is spilling over into a competition to recruit talent.
According to China's financial outlet Cailianshe on the 3rd, UBTECH said in a recent job posting that it is launching a global open recruitment for a chief scientist of embodied intelligence. Embodied intelligence refers to "AI with a body." It means AI performing actions in the real physical world beyond the screen, and is cited as a next-generation core field after Generative AI. The Washington Post (WP) called embodied intelligence "the biggest market opportunity ever."
The annual salary UBTECH presented for the chief scientist of embodied intelligence ranges from at least 15 million yuan (about 3.3 billion won) to as much as 1.24 billion yuan (about 27.2 billion won). According to the industry, compared with global big tech's AI talent pay ranging in the hundreds of millions of won, with some key personnel earning in the several billions, this is overwhelmingly high.
The company said the position plays a key role overseeing the technology roadmap for humanoids and embodied intelligence. Specifically, it will lead areas such as vision-language-action (VLA) integrated models, foundational robot models, and learning for manipulation and precise movements. Through this, it plans to extend technologies that had remained at the research stage into real industrial settings and accelerate commercialization across fields including smart manufacturing, commercial services, and home robots. Alongside this, UBTECH is also hiring for dozens of key roles such as hardware engineers, software engineers, and developers.
According to Cailianshe, UBTECH, founded in 2012, is a technology corporations that covers the humanoid spectrum and develops and manufactures service robot solutions. It drew attention as the "first listed humanoid company" when it listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in Dec. 2023. UBTECH is currently regarded as a leading corporations in the global humanoid market.
Its performance growth is also steep. According to results the company released on the 31st of last month, 2025 annual sales were 2.01 billion yuan (about 440.6 billion won), up 53.3% from a year earlier. In particular, full-body embodied-intelligence humanoids accounted for 41% of total sales, emerging as the largest revenue source. Driven by the expansion of sales in this area, gross profit rose 750 million yuan (about 164.4 billion won), up 101.5%, and among that, the robots institutional sector gross profit surged 448 million yuan (about 98.2 billion won), up 1,568.1%.
R&D investment is also continuing aggressively. Last year's R&D investment exceeded 500 million yuan (about 109.6 billion won), accounting for 25.4% of sales. It holds about 3,000 patents, of which more than 1,700 are invention patents.
UBTECH is expanding the application of humanoids to manufacturing as well as logistics and services. In practice, it is deploying humanoids at factories of major Chinese automakers to test performance in assembly, inspection, and logistics assistance. Reuters said, "China is seeking to apply AI across society to boost productivity. It plans to expand the deployment of humanoids and AI automation equipment on various production lines," adding that, amid this industrial growth, the competition to secure top talent will become even fiercer.