X Uses ‘Snack Budget’ to Recruit Meta Executives and AI Engineers

Meta cut about 8,000 jobs in May 2026 and reassigned roughly 6,500 engineers and product managers to its Applied AI division, which was established in March. Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth acknowledged on June 2 that employee morale was close to its lowest point in the company’s 20-year history. That has turned office perks into another front in the battle between X and Meta for AI, data and core product talent.

On June 18, 2026, X product chief Nikita Bier publicly appealed on X to “overlooked Meta employees,” seeking network and data engineers as well as data scientists. He promised a snack budget that would at least match, and possibly exceed, Meta’s, and asked applicants to include the word “snacks.” The X Core Product software engineering position he linked to offered an annual salary of $180,000–$440,000.