The largest technology companies still dominate the public story about AI talent. Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind are treated as the centre of the market, with every senior move read as a sign of who is winning the next phase of AI. WIRED has reported extreme offers for top researchers, while Reuters has tracked Meta’s push to recruit senior AI talent as part of its attempt to close the gap with rivals.
For founders, the more important question is not whether Big Tech can still attract rare people. It can. The useful question is whether Big Tech is still the default place where ambitious operators want to spend the next five years.
Zeki’s data suggests the answer is changing.
After a muted 2023, hiring into scale-ups rose 46 per cent in 2024 and grew a further 51 per cent across 2025 and 2026. Movement from the Magnificent Seven into scale-ups also increased. The share of scale-up hires coming from those companies rose from around 5 per cent to 6.6 per cent over two years. In absolute terms, hires from the Magnificent Seven into scale-ups increased 56 per cent in 2024 and 80 per cent in 2025.
This is the part founders should pay attention to. Not the celebrity researcher packages. Not the lab-by-lab scorecard. The practical change is that more people trained in high-performance technology environments are now entering the scale-up market at exactly the moment scale-ups need more disciplined execution.
That does not mean the market has become easy. It means the opportunity has become more precise.
The operator is becoming as important as the inventor
The first version of many deep-tech companies is built around invention. A founding team proves that something difficult is possible. It may be a model, a device, a workflow, a platform, a drug discovery process, a robotics system or a new layer of infrastructure.
The next version is built around translation.
Can the company turn a technical advantage into something customers understand, trust and adopt? Can it move from bespoke delivery to repeatable deployment? Can it hire people who know how complex technology behaves inside real organisations, with procurement, security reviews, integration problems, customer anxiety and long feedback loops?
This is where the scale-up hiring market becomes more interesting than the AI talent-war headlines.
The people who matter are not only researchers. They are applied engineers who have seen systems break at scale. Product leaders who know how to make expert tools usable without flattening the science. Solutions and field operators who can hold a technical conversation with the customer and still move the deal forward. GTM leaders who do not mistake activity for progress.
Zeki’s data shows that scale-ups are already hiring in that direction. Engineering hiring continues to grow strongly, science and research roles are growing steadily, and GTM roles are accelerating fastest, with roughly 76 per cent year-on-year growth.
That is not a soft signal. It is a change in the operating model of the scale-up. The bottleneck is no longer only whether the company can build. It is whether the company can build, explain, sell, deploy and learn at the same time.
Big-company experience is useful only when it travels
Founders often treat Big Tech experience as if it were automatically portable. It is not.
A person can be excellent inside a large system and struggle inside a company where the scaffolding has not yet been built. The reverse is also true. Some of the most useful scale-up hires are people who learned speed, quality and operating discipline inside a dominant company, but do not need the whole machine around them to be effective.
The distinction matters because the wrong big-company hire can slow a scale-up down. They may bring process before there is enough repeatability to process. They may optimise for stakeholders the company does not yet have. They may wait for resources a scale-up cannot provide.
The right hire does something different. They extract the useful habits from a larger environment and resize them.
They know which standards matter and which are theatre. They know where a young company needs rigour immediately, and where it needs to stay flexible. They can help a founder stop improvising without making the company feel corporate.
That is the profile worth searching for.
The rise in Magnificent Seven movement into scale-ups does not mean every ex-Big Tech candidate is a fit. It means the pool of potentially relevant operators has widened. The hiring advantage goes to founders who can tell the difference.
The role should be defined around the next constraint
Most hiring briefs still begin with a title. VP Sales. Head of Product. Applied AI Engineer. Solutions Lead. Founding Account Executive.
Titles are useful for posting jobs. They are less useful for diagnosing what the company actually needs.
For a scale-up, the better starting point is the next constraint. What is the problem that will stop the company from compounding over the next 12 months?
If the answer is unreliable deployment, the hire may need implementation depth more than pure product pedigree. If the answer is enterprise trust, the hire may need technical credibility in front of buyers. If the answer is founder-led selling, the company may need someone who can turn founder intuition into a repeatable commercial system. If the answer is roadmap drift, the hire may need to translate customer pressure into product discipline.
This is why scale-up hiring feels hard even when there are more candidates in motion. The market is not short of plausible people. It is short of clearly matched people.
Zeki Talent Market is built for this tighter version of hiring: exceptional engineering, product and GTM talent, matched to scale-up companies through evidence rather than guesswork. Candidates are identified through Zeki’s intelligence layer and evaluated through signals drawn from more than 30,000 public sources. More than 70 per cent of candidates on the ZTM waitlist are Magnificent Seven alumni, and nine in ten have worked at a top innovation company.
The important point for founders is not volume. It is fit.
The strongest hiring processes now start before the search. They start with a sharper view of what the company is becoming.
The market is opening, but not evenly
The current movement into scale-ups creates an advantage only for companies ready to use it.
Founders who are vague about the role will still lose time. Companies that cannot explain why the work matters will still struggle to convert strong people. Teams that want senior talent but have not decided what authority the hire will actually have will still leak candidates in process.
The companies that benefit will be more specific.
They will know which capability is missing. They will understand whether they need invention, translation or execution. They will be clear about the trade-off they are offering a candidate leaving a larger platform: less infrastructure, more ownership; less certainty, more influence; fewer layers, more consequence.
That is a credible proposition. But only if it is true.
Scale-ups do not need to pretend they can match Big Tech on every dimension. They need to know where they are a better answer for the right person at the right time.
The data shows that more of those people are entering the market. The mistake would be assuming they will arrive through the old channels, in the old order, with the old signals attached.
They will not.
The next hiring advantage belongs to founders who understand the movement early, define the real constraint clearly and recognise portable excellence before it becomes obvious to everyone else.