DeepSeek said to target a team of about 1,000 this year as hiring broadens beyond model research

DeepSeek is aiming to expand its workforce to about 1,000 people this year, according to BlockBeats, which cited a frontline institutional investor. The company has not publicly confirmed that figure, but its hiring push is already under way. In June, DeepSeek said every department would at least double in size, and this week it opened roughly 150 positions focused on backend and agent infrastructure. The latest hiring round shows the expansion is no longer centered only on model research. Open roles now span large-model research platforms, agent frameworks, APIs, online services, data engineering and elastic computing. The report also cited Cui Tianyi, head of the Harness team, who said data volumes, machines, training and evaluation workloads, agent environments and user requests are all rising quickly. That increase is putting pressure on DeepSeek’s existing backend architecture, which he said needs continuous upgrades and, in some cases, a full rewrite.