OpenAI starts hiring engineers in India to deepen enterprise focus

Speaking at a media roundtable in Bengaluru on Tuesday, the San Francisco-based company’s chief technology officer, business applications, Srinivas Narayanan, and India head of strategy and global affairs, Pragya Misra, said the company has started hiring solutions engineers in its India team.

While they did not disclose any hiring figures, they said their plan was to hire a “lean team” during the first year of establishing an office in the country.

“When we announced our India office in August, we have go-to-market missions that have been open for the last month or so,” Misra said. “Since then, we have opened a number of market entry positions, as well as solutions engineers and architects who can support these market entrants.”

He added that the company will focus on building a core team in the first six months to a year. “And of course we will continue to build more,” Misra added.

The solutions architect or engineer is an important layer between a technology company’s core engineering department and the sales team. Traditionally, solution architects consult with sales departments to understand demand from businesses and design custom software features with the core engineering team based on business needs.

Over the years, technology companies like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google have made adjustments to their core technology offerings, such as Windows 11 and Google Cloud apps, to meet the needs businesses need.

A quick look at OpenAI’s careers page shows that the company is currently increasing its presence in India by hiring senior sales executives to manage relationships with startups and large enterprises.

The company also plans to hire people for eight roles, including AI deployment manager, solutions architect, and “Head of Global Affairs, Asia-Pacific.” As the company looks to increase its presence in India and capitalize on the popularity of ChatGPT, solution architects can play a key role.

OpenAI is eyeing Bengaluru to increase its presence. “We also want to deepen our relationship with developers and Bangalore,” Narayanan said. The company already manages startup relationships in the city, and Misra adds that building startup relationships “is really a big part of what we want to do.” One in five sales roles OpenAI currently lists in India is for account directors of startups.

right move

Analysts were not surprised by OpenAI’s move. “The effort to sell a wide range of industry-specific AI models so far has not fully borne fruit,” said Sudarshan Seshadri, partner at Tiger Analytics, adding that India will likely see various tech companies offering industry-specific models such as Masters for financial applications, all of which will require solution architects.

Earlier this year, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said during the launch of its latest model, the GPT-5, that India was the company’s largest market outside the US and could even soon become its largest.

India is one of the most populous countries in the world with over 1 billion users on the internet. This has caused OpenAI, which has 800 million weekly active users worldwide, to double down on a market where Google already has a strong position thanks to Search and Android.

Kashyap Kompella, senior technology analyst and founder of RPA2AI Research, noted that OpenAI’s mediated AI play with ChatGPT is not improving for businesses.

“Now that Google is trying to catch up and others like Anthropic are joining the party, OpenAI will require such engineers to be able to fine-tune its offerings in the Indian market,” he said. “The demand won’t be in the thousands, but it will definitely be a steady demand.”

OpenAI’s plans to increase headcount in India follow announcements to make some AI platforms free for a year.

The company had launched a ChatGPT Go plan specifically for India. ₹399 in August, offering features such as higher message limits, image creation and file upload capabilities. A week ago, the company had announced that this plan would be free for 12 months for users who signed up during a limited-time promotional period.

The artificial intelligence company also plans to set up a 1GW data center in the country and is in talks with local partners for the same. This will be a challenge for the country’s plans to strengthen its artificial intelligence infrastructure under OpenAI’s Stargate brand.

Stargate is a $500 billion global AI infrastructure initiative backed by OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank and MGX.