The chip industry in 2026 is seeing a sharp increase in newly posted positions, with average salaries continuing to climb.
According to the latest data provided to First Financial by Liepin, from January to September this year, new job postings in the chip sector grew 22.2% compared to the same period last year, with an average advertised annual salary of 291,900 yuan, up 8.8% year-on-year.
At the same time, in the recent job market, a host of chip manufacturers have begun hunting for advanced packaging talent. Moore Threads is recruiting an "Advanced Packaging Design Engineer" with a monthly salary ranging from 25k to 50k yuan; Cambricon Technologies Corporation Limited (688256) has also listed a "Chip Packaging Process Engineer" position in its campus recruitment; and Enflame Technology has gone even further, offering a maximum annual package of up to 1.8 million yuan for an AI chip architect specializing in Chiplet/D2D (die-to-die) direction—a "sky-high" salary.
Behind the buzz, on one side the industry still faces a huge talent gap, but on the other, graduates are facing increasingly fierce competition, making it harder to "break into" the field.
The Million-Yuan AI Chip Architect That's Hard to Find
"Packaging's share of the entire industry has been rising year by year, and it's in an upward phase with unlimited potential, covering multiple fields such as AI, robotics, and biochips," said a person associated with a research group at the School of Integrated Circuit Science and Engineering at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.
From the recruitment market perspective, several domestic chip manufacturers have begun extending their horizons to key areas such as semiconductor equipment, processes, and packaging.
Latest data from Liepin shows that from January to September 2026, newly posted Chiplet-related positions surged 211.2% year-on-year, with cumulative growth over two years reaching 451.4%. Currently, the average advertised annual salary for Chiplet-related roles is as high as 649,500 yuan, about 2.23 times the chip industry average of 291,900 yuan.
Meanwhile, advanced packaging, which serves as the industrial foundation, has also seen steady volume growth, with new job postings up 134.6% year-on-year and an average annual salary reaching 422,400 yuan.
A headhunter known online as "Semiconductor Headhunter Brother Chen," who has been deeply engaged in the industry for over a decade, told reporters that the fastest-growing talent demand is currently in AI-related chip design directions, including CPU, GPU, NPU, and others; storage, optical chips, and optical communications related to computing power are also growing rapidly; while demand in traditional consumer electronics, security, and other areas remains relatively stable.
But those at the pinnacle of the pyramid remain extremely few. The aforementioned "sky-high" salary position at Enflame Technology requires applicants to have at least a master's degree and more than 10 years of chip architecture experience. First Financial reporters reached out to Enflame Technology regarding the recruitment situation, but had not received a reply as of press time.
Behind the high salary, however, is the market's extreme pricing for composite talent who can span "architecture + packaging + interconnect."
"Architects who meet the criteria of 10-plus years of experience and have large-computing-power AI or GPU Chiplet project experience—there are only about 200 to 300 truly qualified people nationwide, and most have already been locked in by leading companies," an insider at a listed AI chip company revealed to reporters. "The vast majority of domestic Chiplet projects are still stuck in early architecture definition or verification stages. Companies that can actually cultivate architecture-level talent from them are exceedingly rare."
This scarcity directly drives up companies' recruitment costs. The insider revealed that companies on average need to receive about 50 to 80 resumes to screen out one that advances to a technical interview; the proportion that ultimately reaches the offer stage is less than 5%, and the average recruitment cycle for key architecture positions lasts 70 to 90 days.
Not So Easy to Enter the Industry
The other side of high-end positions being "hard to find" is that many graduates find the entry barrier rising. Multiple interviewees told reporters that in the past two years, semiconductor industry graduates have found it less easy to "break into" the field.
Wang Pan, a PhD from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and co-founder of Suxian Microelectronics, told First Financial reporters that changes in the semiconductor employment environment are closely tied to industry cycles. "Around 2005, the number of domestic microelectronics graduates was scarce—for example, a certain top university had only single digits—and job opportunities in this major were very few, with many turning to other directions such as the internet. By 2021–2022, as the number of related companies in the market surged, demand for talent rose sharply," Wang Pan said. "At that time, mid-to-senior technical talent with 3 to 5 years of experience was extremely scarce, and salaries could rise to three times the original level, with some senior designers earning over a million yuan annually."
Fang Wan (pseudonym), a PhD in microelectronics from a domestic 985 university, just finished job hunting this year and has now joined a major domestic internet company. According to his observations, in the past two years the number of fresh graduates in relevant majors has surged, cross-disciplinary talent has also poured in, and the industry has entered an adjustment period. Although salaries haven't dropped, the number of HCs (headcounts) has shrunk, and job-hunting difficulty has increased significantly.
"Four years ago, a degree from a prestigious school in the field could get you an offer; now, companies can always pick out from hundreds or thousands of resumes the person who has both the academic credentials and vertical internship experience. The brand endorsement of prestigious schools is weakening, and a degree has become a mere敲门砖—a ticket to knock on the door. PhDs tend to have higher average salaries, but the requirements for vertical experience are also stricter," Fang Wan said. "Classmates around me have gone to foreign companies, major domestic internet firms, and leading chip manufacturers; competitive pressure is generally quite high."
The rapid iteration of AI large models has also imposed new requirements on job seekers' capabilities. "The closer you get to the semiconductor底层—devices, materials, transistor-level circuits, etc.—the harder it is for AI to replace you," Fang Wan said. "At the upper code/modeling layer of chip design, AI replacement is more obvious, with 80% to 90% of code able to be generated by AI. People's work focus shifts to task decomposition, thinking, and interacting with AI, and demand for entry-level coding positions is expected to decrease."
From Poaching Talent to Cultivating Talent
On one side, companies are waving high salaries to recruit; on the other, graduates lament that "breaking into the industry isn't easy." Multiple interviewees told reporters that behind the contradiction lies mainly a structural mismatch between market supply and demand.
"A matching major doesn't equal fully matching job capabilities, especially in high-threshold fields like chip design and advanced processes. Companies often want applicants to have both a solid theoretical foundation and project practice, tool usage, or engineering verification experience," Liepin believes. "For fresh graduates, lacking relevant project experience may make it hard to directly meet the requirements of some positions; while the senior engineers companies urgently need cannot be quickly cultivated through short-term training. This creates a misalignment between total talent volume, professional backgrounds, and actual job requirements."
Against this backdrop, in recent years, "industry-education integration" between universities and companies has begun to take root, with enterprises gradually shifting from "poaching talent" to "cultivating talent." This year, Shanghai Dianji University moved graduate students' workstations directly into an industrial park, where students take on specific module development as "quasi-employees" during their studies and are responsible for delivery results; the Beijing Integrated Circuit Industry-Education Integration Base uses a model of "companies pose the questions, universities answer them," allowing companies such as SMIC, NAURA, and ChangXin Integrated to jointly tackle industrial topics with universities; in the Chiplet direction, Guangdong University of Technology and Silicon Core Technology jointly built a 2.5D/3D Chiplet joint laboratory; and Shanghai University has opened a special class on integrated chiplet advanced packaging, jointly cultivating students with related companies.
These attempts are all moving talent cultivation from post-onboarding to real projects during students' time on campus.
Multiple interviewees judge that future competition in the chip industry will become increasingly fierce, especially for entry-level positions, while AI chip architects/senior engineers with 3 to 5 years of experience remain the focus of market competition.
"In the next 3 to 5 years, the most urgent gaps are concentrated in three areas: D2D/C2C interconnect protocols and self-developed IP, HBM interface design, and AI workload-driven system-level architecture optimization. The shortage of talent in chip full-stack design, 3D stacking, and advanced packaging will be a long-term trend," the aforementioned chip insider said.
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