Taotian opens 2027 campus recruitment with AI roles making up over 90% of tech positions

On August 5, Alibaba's Taotian Group announced the opening of its 2027 campus recruitment, targeting domestic and overseas graduates who will graduate between November 1, 2026 and October 30, 2027 — the latest sign that the e-commerce giant is doubling down on AI talent.

The program covers three job families: AI technology, AI product, and AI design, with AI technology roles accounting for more than 90% of positions. The three core openings are AI application R&D engineer, AI Agent optimization engineer (data/training/evaluation), and AI application algorithm engineer.

Applications opened the same day through Alibaba Group's campus recruitment website, Taotian's own campus recruitment site, and Taotian's recruitment WeChat account. Offers are expected to be issued from late October, with work locations in Hangzhou and Beijing.

Taotian said it is increasing AI investment and building tailored career paths for newcomers, aiming to grow them from technology implementers into intelligent system architects. Putting AI Agent and algorithm roles at the center of campus hiring shows that AI capability is now treated as a core part of Taotian's operations.

The company's AI deployment pace has accelerated this year: Taobao launched the Business Manager (生意管家) workbench in March, released the AI customer service product AI Dianxiaomi in May while integrating Taobao with Tongyi Qianwen, and unveiled four results from its AIGX technology system in July, including the Paipaitao real-time multimodal Agent, the all-scenario AI creation workbench if Studio, the Coupella engine, and the DREAM agentic recommendation system.

This large-scale AI campus drive is both a direct reflection of business demand and an early signal in the talent war. With model capabilities converging, whoever builds up enough AI application and Agent engineering talent first is more likely to convert technology into real advantages in e-commerce experience and merchant efficiency.

What to watch: as offers roll out from late October, it will be worth seeing how this batch of AI-native campus hires is deployed across Taotian's recommendation, customer service, and creation businesses — and whether other Alibaba business groups follow with campus drives of a similar scale.