Baidu Announces Major Overhaul of Employee Ranking System in Company-Wide Letter

Baidu Undertakes Sweeping Job-Level Reform, Targeting Versatile Talent for the AI Era

In May, Baidu issued an internal company-wide letter to all employees, officially announcing a major overhaul of its job-level system. The reform fully integrates the professional and management career tracks below mid-level management. The legacy letter-based job-level labels — including T (Technology), P (Product), E (Engineering), Band, and M (Management) — will be abolished and replaced by a new numerical system ranging from Level 5 to Level 12. The new system will take effect on May 1, 2026.

This marks Baidu's largest organizational restructuring in recent years, sending a strong signal: as the AI wave sweeps across industries, Baidu is reshaping the foundational logic of its talent management.

Merging Dual Tracks: Ending the Binary Split Between 'Professional' and 'Management'

For years, major Chinese internet companies have widely adopted a "dual-track" job-level system, with professional and management sequences developing in parallel. After joining a company, employees typically had to choose between a technical expert path and a managerial path, and switching between the two often involved significant hurdles.

Baidu's previous system followed this same model: the T sequence corresponded to technical roles, the P sequence to product roles, and the M sequence to management roles, each with its own independent promotion criteria and evaluation dimensions. This design had its merits in the past — specialized talent could focus on deepening expertise, while management talent could concentrate on team building.

However, Baidu stated explicitly in the company-wide letter that the AI era demands precisely the kind of "versatile talent" who possesses both professional expertise and leadership skills and can independently take charge. Based on this assessment, the company decided to fully merge the professional and management tracks below mid-level management into a single, unified career development pathway.

This means that going forward, Baidu employees' career growth will no longer be confined by predetermined tracks. Instead, they will need to develop simultaneously along both the dimensions of professional depth and management capability.

Numbers Replace Letters: The Deeper Rationale Behind a Simplified System

On the surface, unifying the multiple letter-based labels — T, P, E, Band, and M — into a pure numerical system from Level 5 to Level 12 most visibly reduces internal communication costs. In the past, cross-referencing job levels across different sequences was often confusing — questions like "What P level does T7 correspond to? And how does that relate to M levels?" were commonplace among employees at major tech firms. With a unified numerical system, cross-departmental and cross-functional collaboration and evaluation will become more transparent and efficient.

At a deeper level, this reform also reflects Baidu's forward-looking judgment about how work will evolve in the AI era:

• Increasingly blurred role boundaries: As AI tools become widespread, the lines between technology, product, and operations are breaking down. An AI project leader may need to simultaneously understand model principles, steer product direction, and coordinate team resources.
• Accelerated flat management: A numerical job-level system is inherently better suited to flat organizational structures, helping reduce hierarchical barriers and speed up decision-making.
• Restructured incentive mechanisms: A unified track means promotion criteria will be redefined, with "the ability to both execute and lead" likely becoming a core evaluation dimension.

Industry Trend: Tech Giants Reshaping Their Talent Systems

Baidu is not the first tech giant to overhaul its job-level system. In recent years, Tencent simplified its multi-sequence job levels, and Alibaba has adjusted its "P sequence" promotion rules and level mappings multiple times. These adjustments all point in a common direction: the finely divided specialization systems of the traditional internet era are being reshaped by the AI era's demand for "all-around players."

For employees, this transformation presents both opportunities and challenges. The path of deep specialization in a single technical domain to reach top expert status may be redefined, with future promotions placing greater emphasis on comprehensive capabilities. How to broaden horizontal skills while maintaining professional depth will become an essential question for every practitioner.

Outlook: Organizational Reform Paves the Way for AI Strategy

Baidu is currently going all-in on AI, with virtually every business line — from the ERNIE large language model to its intelligent cloud and autonomous driving — being restructured around AI. This major job-level system overhaul is fundamentally about providing organizational support for the deeper advancement of its AI strategy. When the nature of business undergoes fundamental change, the talent evaluation and incentive systems must evolve accordingly.

The new system will officially go into effect on May 1, 2026, at which point Baidu's internal talent mobility, promotion evaluation criteria, and team collaboration models will all undergo significant changes. Whether this transformation from a "dual-track" to a "unified-track" system can truly unleash the vitality of the versatile talent needed in the AI era is well worth watching.