India's technology talent market closed 2024 with a 23% year-on-year increase in total hiring, according to the foundit Insights Tracker — the steepest annual surge since the post-pandemic rebound of 2021. The country's employment market is forecast to grow a further 9% through 2025, driven by global capability centre (GCC) expansion, domestic digital transformation, and surging demand for AI and cloud skills.
Global Capability Centres — sometimes called Global In-house Centres or Captive Centres — are fully-owned subsidiaries that multinationals establish in India to handle core engineering, analytics, and product work. In 2024 alone, over 110 new GCCs opened across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai, and Gurugram. Companies including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Apple, Boeing, and Walmart have all significantly expanded their India engineering headcount.
The driver is straightforward: a senior software engineer in Bengaluru costs approximately 20–30% of an equivalent hire in San Francisco or London — while the talent quality, particularly in data engineering, full-stack development, and cloud infrastructure, is genuinely world-class.
"India is no longer just a cost arbitrage play. The quality of engineering talent — especially at the senior level — is on par with anything you'll find globally. That's a fundamental shift."
— NASSCOM GCC Council Report, 2024
Demand is far from uniform across skill categories. The roles commanding the highest premium in India's tech market right now:
Salaries for GenAI engineers with 3–5 years of experience have risen 40–60% year-on-year in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, making this the hottest candidate segment by a wide margin.
With Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune reaching near-saturation for senior tech talent, progressive employers are increasingly turning to Tier-2 cities — Indore, Coimbatore, Jaipur, Kochi, and Nagpur. Wage levels are 25–40% lower than Tier-1 equivalents, attrition rates are measurably lower, and NASSCOM reports that these cities collectively graduate over 180,000 engineering students annually.
OneSoft's global talent search practice covers 18 Tier-2 and Tier-3 Indian cities, giving our clients access to talent pools that competitors simply don't know how to reach.
India's tech attrition rate — which spiked above 23% during the Great Resignation of 2021–22 — has moderated to approximately 14–16% in 2025. However, this remains structurally higher than comparable markets in Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia. The organisations winning the retention battle share common traits:
Our India tech practice runs dedicated hiring desks for GCCs, product companies, and BFSI technology functions. We combine deep domain knowledge with proprietary talent mapping across 22 cities, ensuring our clients hire faster, better, and with lower attrition than the market average.
