Hengyu From Ao Fei Temple
Quantum Bit | Public Account QbitAI
Former Agent top star Manus has returned to Beijing and is recruiting again.
And this time, it’s coming to the domestic market.
Latest news: The parent company of Manus, Butterfly Effect, recently completed a new round of financing of over $500 million. This round was led by BoYu Investment and IDG Capital, with existing shareholders Tencent, Sequoia China, and Zhenjie Fund continuing to support it.
At the same time, Manus is rebuilding its team to develop AI Agent products for the Chinese market.
Compared to 11 before the National Day holiday, 6 more were added during the holiday, including 1 internship position.
According to the latest information on Manus Recruitment’s official website, currently 17 positions are available, including 16 full-time positions and 1 internship position.
Compared to the 11 recruitment positions before National Day, the scale has significantly increased.
It is worth noting that this recruitment involves a range of core technology and product positions, including AI Agent Product Manager, Agent Harness engineer, Agent evaluation engineer, and LLM algorithm engineer.
Looking at this situation, Manus seems to be preparing to reestablish a team in the country that can independently carry out product development, operations, and commercialization.
However, this matter involving Manus is somewhat dramatic.
In May last year, Manus’ headquarters moved to Singapore; in July, Manus significantly reduced its team in China and shifted its business focus overseas.
Then, Manus went through a series of changes, including being acquired by Meta, the acquisition deal being halted by regulators, original shareholders repurchasing their shares, and regaining independent operations.
Today, this story of fluctuations that have lasted for over a year, has brought Manus back to where he started.
With many twists and turns, a young man returns.
Manus returns to Beijing, the past "cutting off" and the present "turning back"
Late at night on September 28th, Manus posted a message on its new official public account “Butterfly Effect”, announcing that Manus will launch a version 2.0 for overseas users, as well as an intelligent assistant Cue for personal life scenarios.
More notable is the second sentence of the entire text:
At the same time, we are currently forming a team to develop products for the domestic market, and cooperation with domestic model manufacturers and ecosystem partners is also progressing steadily. More updates will be shared later.
The next day, Shao Hong, the founder of Manus, posted another message on his social media account, introducing the product concepts of Manus 2.0 and Cue. He also confirmed that the domestic version is being actively prepared, and expressed his willingness to recruit and engage in cooperation.
As for how the Manus Chinese team plans to proceed, the job positions may reveal more information.
We checked the Manus recruitment official website.
The currently available positions cover various departments such as product, engineering, business cooperation, and operations.
Technical side: there are LLM algorithm engineers, Agent Harness engineers, and Agent evaluation engineers, as well as full-stack engineers, backend engineers, security engineers, virtualization engineers, and DevOps engineers.
Product side, which includes AI Agent Product Manager, product designers, product marketing manager, and Agent evaluation research interns.
In addition, there are positions for business analysis, user and product operations, user growth, customer support, and community operations.
Among them, several positions are directly related to Agent product development, execution frameworks, and evaluation.
For example, Agent Harness engineers are mainly involved in the operating framework and related infrastructure required for agents to execute tasks; Agent evaluation engineers are responsible for measuring indicators such as the quality and stability of agents in completing tasks—these roles are closely related to whether the Agent product can continue to evolve and perform complex tasks reliably.
It can be seen that Manus’ recruitment functions have coverage across multiple areas, including basic engineering, product development, quality assessment, market promotion, user growth, and commercialization.
This is also the first public localization setup after Manus was repurchased by Chinese capital and resumed independent operations.
However, the office location for the new team has not been announced yet (previously, Manus’s office in Beijing was located in a shared office space in the epark Haidian Garden Road community, with only 7 workstations).
At present, Manus has not disclosed in detail the specific organizational structure of the Beijing team, nor the launch time of domestic products. However, it is certain that Manus has resumed investing personnel and R&D resources into the Chinese market.
So, why exactly now?
This summer, old shareholders such as Tencent, Zhenji Fund, and HSG repurchased Manus for approximately $2 billion. On September 1st, Manus officially resumed independent operations, with the founding team taking the helm again.
Changes in the equity structure and business environment have created conditions for Manus to relayout the Chinese market.
Look at the market again.
According to a white paper published by relevant institutions of the China Communication Industry Association, the market size of Chinese enterprise-level AI intelligent agents is expected to reach 44.9 billion yuan in 2026, and exceed 332 billion yuan in 2029.
At the same time, Beijing has gathered a large number of large model companies, research institutions, and AI engineering professionals, giving it an advantage in Agent development, implementation, and industrial ecosystems.
The combination of equity, market, and talent factors explains why Manus returned to Beijing at this time.
However, for a company that significantly reduced its Chinese team a year ago, restarting recruitment within the country also means facing some old problems again.
A backtracking son must face a real concern
Returning to Beijing to recruit troops, Manus cannot avoid one question:
Will the team downsizing that happened over a year ago have an impact on this recruitment?
In July last year, news of Manus’ workforce reduction suddenly came out. The company had approximately 120 employees in its domestic team, and more than 40 core technical staff were planned to move to Singapore, while the rest were facing layoffs.
The statement that was circulated at that time was “the relevant compensation scheme includes N+3 or 2N”.
At this time, it is less than half a year since Manus became popular in March 2025 with its general agent product. The company has just become one of the most notable names in China’s AI startup community.
Regarding organizational adjustments, the explanation given by Manus at that time was, based on the company's own operational efficiency, some business teams were adjusted to continue focusing on core business development.
From a business decision-making perspective, this choice certainly has its background.
For a rapidly growing AI startup, changes in the financing environment, target customers, technical resources, and regulatory conditions may all lead to adjustments in the team structure.
In particular, when Manus focused on overseas markets as its business focus and moved to Singapore, there were understandable reasons from a management perspective.
But for employees, another set of logic also holds true.
After all, a company can choose a new location and business focus based on strategic changes, but employees have to face specific career arrangements, living costs, and career plans.
So, more than a year ago, the Chinese team was chosen to be phased out, and now they have re-entered the recruitment process. Will this history affect job seekers' judgment on Manus?
From the perspective of potential candidates, at least the following issues deserve consideration.
For example, what proportion of the core R & D work will the domestic team actually undertake? Is the domestic product line a long-term strategy or a phased business experiment? If the market environment or company strategy changes again in the future, where will the Chinese team be positioned?
Especially for candidates in core positions such as Agent algorithm, infrastructure, and product leaders, job stability, career development opportunities, and the voice they have in technical decision-making all affect their career choices.
Therefore, this time Manus wants to hire and retain key talent, and it may require more sincerity than before.
This sincerity is a touchstone to testing “a stray child returns with no loss.”
If the compensation offered by Manus is sufficient, and the Chinese team has enough influence in the overall technology landscape and strategic decisions, then based on its past strength and technical vision, this recruitment effort will indeed put considerable “talent competition” pressure on local AI startups.
Back to the Storm Center
Another change that cannot be ignored—
Now, when re-forming the Chinese team, the competitive landscape that Manus faces is no longer what it used to be.
As Xiao Hong said on his social media circle, “When Manus was created, there was no Codex by OpenAI in the world, nor any Claude Cowork by Anthropic.”
It brings me quite a sense of emotion.
When it was launched in March 2025, the only general Agent product on the AI market that could autonomously break down tasks, call tools, operate web pages, and deliver results based on user instructions was Manus. It was a rare item in the AI market.
At that time, Manus quickly became popular due to its relatively complete task execution capabilities, and became one of the most备受 attention products in the global Agent market.
But today, Agents have become a direction in which tech giants are investing heavily.
In overseas markets, OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code continuously enhance code development and task execution capabilities. Anthropic's Claude Cowork further pushes the Agent capabilities into knowledge-based work and daily office scenarios.
Both companies have leading large model capabilities, along with large user and developer ecosystems.
At the same time, the level of Agent technology and product forms worldwide have been greatly enhanced, and even Meta, which often encounters setbacks in the era of large models, can turn things around with its personal Agent “Muse”.
During the more than a year when Manus was absent, the competition in the domestic Agent track has also intensified.
WorkBuddy, Qianwen Office, DouBao Work, ZCode, Kimi Work… There are countless names, not to mention that even skilled developers can use DeepSeek Harness to build their own tools.
These products quickly captured market positions, occupying a large portion of the mind and various scenarios.
And due to their strong strength, they also possess channel and ecosystem advantages that Manus finds it temporarily difficult to replicate.
On the other hand, the iteration of domestic models has also significantly reduced the model capability threshold required for Agent product development, providing more underlying options for domestic developers.
In general, users have seen more Agent products, and their requirements for performance, speed, stability, and price have also increased.
And the rise and fall in the AI field is evident to everyone—just take this year as an example. OpenClaw became popular, then faded, and now it basically doesn’t exist at all.
This is no longer a pioneering era where simply introducing new concepts is enough to gain dominance; it is a highly competitive stage where competition is as important as actual implementation.
Of course, Manus didn’t return empty-handed either.
From the product direction of its latest release, Manus is trying to enable the Agent to handle more ongoing tasks, and expand the collaboration scenarios between humans and Agents, as well as between Agents themselves.
Whether these capabilities can be transformed into products that domestic users are willing to use long-term still needs to be verified later.
More than a year ago, when Manus left China, the Agent was still a new arena full of potential.
More than a year later, Manus returned, with more competitors and a changed industry threshold.
Can this “return of the wanderer” ultimately lead to new growth and a new surge?
Only move forward and see what happens.
Reference link:
[1]https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/oZ8ZPaurRHtLX-65EbyZCg
[2]https://careers.manus.im/cn/jobs