GenAI boom drives demand for specialist engineers in India's IT sector

Cybersecurity, a sector with approximately 10K-15K job openings in India, is witnessing growing demand for roles such as network security engineers, penetration testers, cloud security specialists

The entry-level engineering landscape in India’s IT services industry is undergoing a seismic shift. With the growing influence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and agentic AI, companies are redefining job roles to enhance productivity and efficiency, often at the cost of traditional headcount.

 

While the core role of a software developer remains, the industry is increasingly seeking specialists in cybersecurity, cloud security, and data analytics, domains that are commanding higher salaries and stronger demand.

 

“We will hire more people at the entry level, but we will need specialised skill sets. Expectations from them will be higher. We need to train them more, put them through some simulations so that they can validate code written by coding assistants rather than just writing code,” C Vijayakumar, chief executive and managing director of HCLTech, told Business Standard.

 

This signals a fundamental transformation in what is expected from fresh engineering graduates. Experts suggest that instead of merely writing a single line of code per minute, new hires should be capable of producing multiple lines while leveraging AI tools for efficiency.

 

“There will be entry level roles, but what is L2 and L3 will become L1 because automation is making a lot of entry level jobs redundant,” said Neeti Sharma, chief executive of staffing firm TeamLease Digital.

 

Cybersecurity, a sector with approximately 10,000-15,000 job openings in India, is witnessing growing demand for roles such as network security engineers, penetration testers, cloud security specialists, IT security consultants, and threat intelligence leads, according to TeamLease’s data shared with Business Standard.

 

Entry level engineers for these roles can be paid between ₹4 lakh to ₹8 lakh annually, which can go beyond ₹30 lakhs for people with more than eight years of experience. Significantly higher than what an entry-level fresher gets these days.

 

Similarly, there is a huge demand in cloud roles as more companies shift their physical data centres to the cloud to control cost. With over 50,000 job openings across various cloud-related roles, including cloud security engineers, cloud architects, DevOps engineers, and cloud compliance managers, salaries for freshers start at ₹5 lakh and can exceed ₹30 lakh annually for those with over a decade of experience.

 

According to Nasscom, India will create about 2.7 million new and reskilled AI jobs by 2028. That will need a number of data scientists who will have to work with trusted data, ethically manage data sets, train and retrain algorithms and keep them in check. Other roles coming up are prompt engineers, AI developers, AI application developers and cybersecurity professionals.

 

“We are looking for people who have a combination of cloud and AI skills, unlike the more traditional roles we hired for in the past,” Sindhu Gangadharan, managing director of SAP Labs India and Nasscom chairperson, said last week.

 

TeamLease’s Sharma adds that companies now expect L1 engineers not only how to code but how all of this is integrated and built efficiently to give the outcome what the end user wants.

 

Amit Zavery, chief product and operations officer at ServiceNow, said there is a big demand for prompt engineers.

 

“Engineers of today should know the different models and the outcome. Just like cloud applications, they have to learn AI applications and integrate those into legacy systems.”