- More than 80% of internship roles tied to artificial intelligence as company expands technical hiring
- Recruitment drive aligns with broader push into AI agents and next-generation applications
Alibaba Group yesterday launched its 2027 internship recruitment program with a heavy emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI) roles, underscoring how the e-commerce and cloud computing giant is reshaping its workforce around AI as competition for technical talent intensifies.
The hiring campaign, announced March 18, spans 16 business units including Alibaba Cloud, Taobao and Tmall Group, Alibaba International, Tongyi Lab, Wukong (formerly DingTalk), Amap and the Qwen AI division.
AI-related roles account for more than 80% of openings this year, reflecting a significant shift from traditional internet hiring priorities toward advanced computing and model development.
Alibaba has added seven new AI-focused job categories, including AI application engineers, AI algorithm developers, AI agent optimization engineers and infrastructure specialists.
New recruits are expected to work directly on multimodal AI research and large-model deployment after joining, according to the company.
At the Taobao and Tmall unit, technical roles make up more than 90% of available positions across more than 50 job tracks, highlighting how AI is increasingly embedded into core commerce operations.
Newly introduced positions tied to AI applications and agent optimization have become central hiring targets.
The recruitment push comes as Alibaba accelerates development of AI agents — software systems designed to execute tasks autonomously on behalf of users — a strategy the company sees as the next evolution of digital services.
Building on its Qwen large language models, Alibaba has been integrating agent capabilities across its ecosystem, allowing users to complete actions such as shopping, travel booking or local services through conversational AI rather than traditional apps.
The approach aims to shift AI from a chatbot interface into an operational layer across commerce and cloud services.
Alongside the internship drive, Alibaba also opened applications for its elite “Alibaba Star” talent program, which focuses on frontier research areas including foundation models, AI infrastructure, industrial AI and computing architecture.
Since its launch in 2011, the initiative has attracted more than 200 top young researchers worldwide and produced over 3,000 academic papers and patents, contributing to advances in search, recommendation systems and large-model technologies.
The expanded hiring effort signals Alibaba’s longer-term bet that competition in AI will hinge as much on engineering talent and infrastructure as on model performance, as Chinese tech firms race to build practical applications around generative AI.
