A monthly salary of 65,000 yuan, paid 15 times a year, adds up to 975,000 yuan. ByteDance has advertised a salary of 975,000 yuan for one AI job. It's more than 22 times China's average annual disposable income of 43,377 yuan in 2025.

The role is the forward-deployed engineer, or FDE, and China's tech giants are racing to fill it. These engineers work directly with customers to build AI applications and fit them into business operations.

Job postings for FDEs rose 1,523 per cent in the first seven months of the year, compared with the same period of 2025,........

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