(Yicai) May 21 -- DeepSeek has started hiring for product managers and research and development engineers for the Chinese artificial intelligence startup's AI coding agent team, which will be modeled on Claude Code by US peer Anthropic.

The Agent Harness team will be working to "transform DeepSeek's frontier model capabilities into leading agents," with new hires participating in the full development cycle of a desktop agent product, according to the job descriptions posted on the firm's website. The roles are based in Beijing.

The product manager job listing requires applicants to have extensive hands-on experience with tools including Claude Code, Cowork, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, GitHub Copilot, Manus, OpenClaw, and Hermes, a lineup that spans nearly all of the industry's most prominent coding and agentic AI tools. However, DeepSeek did not disclose the type of desktop agent product it is developing.

"Join DeepSeek to build Code Harness from scratch," Deli Chen, a senior researcher at DeepSeek, posted on social media, noting that the project aims to "benchmark against Claude Code."

Chen holds a master's degree from Peking University and joined DeepSeek in 2023. He has been credited on many of the company's key research publications and has emerged as one of its most prominent public voices.

AI coding has become one of the fastest-growing commercial applications of large language models, with the global AI coding tools market reaching USD29.6 billion last year and expected to climb to USD64.7 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate of around 17 percent, according to the world's largest market research store Research and Markets.

Competitors in the AI coding market are already well-established. TikTok owner ByteDance has Trae, Alibaba Group Holding has Tongyi Lingma, Tencent Holdings has CodeBuddy, and Baidu has Wenxin Kuaima in China, while overseas Anthropic has Claude Code and OpenAI has Codex.

Beyond commercial appeal, coding proficiency is a core benchmark for evaluating foundation model capability, with a top-tier coding agent also serving as a key entry point for attracting developer ecosystems.

DeepSeek's move into this space may be linked to its recent fundraising activity, which could give it more resources to pursue product development beyond pure research, industry observers noted.

Editor: Martin Kadiev