The software giant has put together a list of its most-wanted Meta engineers and researchers and is initiating a new process aimed at making offers more attractive including a requirement to match Meta pay of highly sought-after talent, according to sources and internal documents reviewed by Business Insider.
The recent blowout earnings helped Microsoft to drive its market value to nearly $4 trillion, in large part due to buzz about generative AI. In order to continue with that success, Microsoft must attract the best AI engineers and researchers. The firm has laid off thousands of workers in 2017 yet has been adamant that the number of employees will not increase, implying that it has lots of hiring in store.
It is not easy to match Meta offers. The social media giant has been offering top AI talent nine figure sums. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has reportedly been offended by Meta providing his engineers with $100 million signing bonuses, and recently Meta has been willing to pay AI researchers up to $250 million annually.
BI has seen Microsoft documents containing evidence that its software company is offering deals in the multimillion-dollar range, and two individuals who work closely with the process tell BI multimillion-dollar on-hire AI bonuses are increasingly common.
Special recruiting teams are also in place at Microsoft AI, which is led by the former Google DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman, and CoreAI, another Microsoft group headed by the former Meta engineering boss Jay Parikh, these people said. They did not want to be mentioned when writing about delicate, intimate issues.
Parikh has an organizational chart recently seen by BI that indicates that most of his staff is comprised of executives with whom he overlapped at Meta.
A Microsoft spreadsheet with the most-wanted Meta employees has names, locations, job titles, teams, and positions that Microsoft is targeting such as Reality Labs, GenAI Infrastructure, and Meta AI Research. The spreadsheet is circulating to hiring managers on some of the AI teams, one individual familiar with the situation said.
Microsoft has initiated a new competitive offer process, where recruiters are supposed to flag the candidates as the critical AI talent, which is then taken to the higher-ups and they would come up with the best offer of Microsoft within 24 hours.
BI has seen documents demonstrating how that works, including supplying what it calls offer rationale on their AI skills and experience, having a private compensation modeler figure out a custom range on the candidate, and hiring a compensation consultant.
The new process may assist Microsoft in competing against Meta AI talent beyond its conventional remuneration levels.
Recently BI obtained the internal pay guidelines that Microsoft uses to pay engineers and researchers. The top compensation package comprises a salary of 408,000 dollars, on-hire stock awards worth 1.9 million dollars, annual stock awards worth almost 1.5 million dollar and 90 percent annual cash bonuses.
Included in those documents was a significant carve-out in competitive scenarios, e.g. when it comes to the best AI talent, where recruiters are able to request higher pay to hire exceptional applicants.
