Premium| Listen to this article |
NEW DELHI : Bharti Airtel will hire 500 people for its new technology centre in Pune, the telecom operator said in a statement.
This will be Airtel’s fourth digital technology hub in the country and the first in western India to support its strategy to pivot to a digital services company, especially with 5G services on the horizon.
“Airtel is rapidly scaling up its in-house digital talent pool to support transformation into a digital telco. Being an established IT and tech hub, Pune is an obvious choice for Airtel to tap into the talent pool and drive cross-industry collaboration," Pradipt Kapoor, chief information officer, Bharti Airtel, told PTI.
The new facility will initially have 500 digital engineers. Airtel is looking to hire across multiple experience and domains such as big data, machine learning, developer and technical operations.
The company has digital technology hubs in Gurgaon, Bengaluru (Airtel X-Labs) and Noida, with 3,000 employees, making it one of the largest tech employers outside the IT industry.
It plans to hire the new employees from engineering institutes such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), National Institutes of Technology (NITs) and Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs) for its digital technology hubs.
The team will work on Airtel’s digital assets such as Airtel Thanks app, Wynk Music app and the Airtel Xstream, which were developed by its digital engineering teams. Airtel’s content platform has more than 180 million monthly active users.
Airtel claims to have made investments totalling more than $46 billion in the last couple of decades to create a digital infrastructure over which 40% of India’s economic and digital activity takes place.