How to

October 29, 2026

How to outcompete the ‘warp speed’ AI labs on hiring

Spoiler: it’s very hard. But flexible equity, secondaries and real task ownership can help in the recruitment race

Éanna Kelly

4 min read

The AI labs pay jaw-dropping money. Anthropic has advertised London-based engineer roles with salaries of up to £630k a year, and recently made headlines by offering £145k for personal assistants.

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Éanna Kelly

Éanna Kelly is a contributing editor at Sifted, and writes Startup Life , a weekly newsletter on what it takes to build a startup. Follow him on X and LinkedIn

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