What happened: UBTech posted a global recruitment notice for a Chief Scientist of Embodied Intelligence, advertising a salary range that tops out at 124 million yuan (about $18 million).

Why it matters: The role is framed as defining UBTech’s technical roadmap, with emphasis on VLA models, robotics foundation models, and manipulation.

Wider context: UBTech says it’s been testing Walker S2 units with Airbus on aircraft manufacturing lines, while China’s humanoid sector ramps up hiring and scale claims.

Background: UBTech reported 2025 revenue of 2.01 billion yuan, with humanoid products and services at 820.6 million yuan, and says it sold 1,079 full-size humanoids last year.

Chinese humanoid robot maker UBTech is offering $18M to hire a chief AI scientist — The Next Web

Droid Brief Take: If you have to offer up to $18M to find the person who can make your humanoid truly useful, that’s not a dunk, it’s a confession. Still, it’s a sign the talent war has moved into robots.

Key Takeaways:

• Compensation Signal: The 15 million to 124 million yuan range is unusually large even by local standards, and it shows embodied-intelligence roles are being treated as strategic assets.
• Revenue Shift: The company reported 2025 revenue of 2.01B yuan and said humanoid products and services reached 820.6M yuan, a sharp jump from the prior year.
• Focus Areas: The hiring brief highlights VLA/foundation-model work and dexterity, which are the exact areas where humanoids still fail in messy contact-rich tasks.