Become a VLSI Engineer.

NLP Engineers build production language systems — Indic-language models, automatic speech recognition (ASR) and synthesis (TTS), document understanding for enterprise paperwork, IVR and voice-bot stacks for Indian customer support, named-entity recognition and information extraction, and the increasingly common multimodal pipelines that fuse text with vision and speech. The work blends applied research, production engineering, and dataset craft: you train and fine-tune transformer models for low-resource Indic languages, curate parallel corpora and labeled datasets, optimize inference for cost, debug failure modes that only show up in code-mixed Hindi-English speech or in handwritten Tamil documents, and own quality SLOs that mix accuracy, latency, and fairness across 22 official Indian languages. In India through 2026, NLP is one of the highest-impact applied-AI specializations because the global English-first NLP literature transfers poorly to Indic languages — concentrated demand sits at AI-native startups (Sarvam AI, Krutrim, Ola Krutrim, Yellow.ai), the public-good NLP groups at AI4Bharat (IIT-Madras) and Bhashini (Government of India), enterprise SaaS (Freshworks, Zoho ZIA, Postman, Verloop, Haptik), fintech (Razorpay, Cred, Paytm, M2P, IDfy), and the GCCs of Microsoft, Google, Adobe, and Amazon.

Power BI Developers design, build, and maintain the BI layer that turns raw enterprise data into decision-grade dashboards for finance, operations, sales, and supply-chain teams. The core loop is: connecting heterogeneous sources via Power Query (M language), modelling star schemas with fact and dimension tables, writing DAX measures and calculated columns for time-intelligence and KPI logic, publishing to Power BI Service workspaces, enforcing row-level security policies, and tuning slow reports by reducing visual-query counts and optimising DirectQuery folding. In India, this role is the Microsoft-stack alternative to Tableau development — deeply embedded in the M365-heavy enterprises: TCS, Infosys Nia practice, Wipro's Microsoft Business Applications unit, Mahindra Group, Tata Group digital, L&T Infotech (LTIMindtree), HCL, and every banking captive running Azure Synapse or Fabric. Demand spiked in 2024-2026 as Microsoft Fabric (Lakehouse, Semantic Model, Dataflows Gen2) expanded the Power BI surface area and pushed experienced developers into the ₹18-40L band.

Keep production systems fast, available, and observable for millions of users — by writing software that automates operations, runs capacity planning, designs SLOs and error budgets, and owns the on-call rotation for critical services. The role sits between software engineering and operations: you write Go / Python / Rust code, build reliability tooling, design distributed systems for resilience, run incident response, and push back on product launches that risk SLOs. In India, SRE is a premium specialization concentrated at FAANG-IN (Google SRE Bengaluru, Amazon, Microsoft IDC, Netflix India), product unicorns (Razorpay, Flipkart, Swiggy, Dream11, PhonePe, Zerodha), and the GCCs of high-traffic US firms (Uber, LinkedIn, Atlassian, GitHub, Cloudflare, Stripe). The work overlaps with DevOps but skews more toward software engineering: reliability is a product, not a process. Senior SRE pay in India sits at the very top of the technology bracket, often above equivalent SDE-3 backend roles.

Build and operate the internal developer platform — the CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes clusters, service mesh, secrets management, observability stack, and IaC modules — that every other engineer in the company ships on. Platform engineers turn raw cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure) into a paved road: a developer pushes code, the platform takes it from commit to canary to production with logs, metrics, and rollback baked in. In India, the role is concentrated at product unicorns (Razorpay, Zerodha, CRED, PhonePe, Swiggy), GCCs of global firms (Microsoft, Atlassian, Stripe, Walmart Global Tech), and SaaS companies scaling past 200 engineers — typically the point at which a dedicated platform team starts paying for itself in shipping velocity.

Solutions Architects are the customer-facing technical role that bridges what a product can do and what a customer actually needs. They design end-to-end deployments, integrations, and migrations on behalf of the customer's engineering team — sizing infrastructure, mapping data flows, picking the right product modules, drafting reference architectures, and partnering with sales and customer-success to win and expand accounts. The role is genuinely hybrid: it requires deep technical depth (cloud, networking, security, distributed systems) and high verbal craft (workshops, executive presentations, written design docs that survive procurement and security review). In India through 2026, Solutions Architect is one of the highest-paid customer-facing technical roles, concentrated at the GCCs of cloud vendors (AWS India, Microsoft Azure India, Google Cloud India, Oracle, IBM), enterprise SaaS companies (Salesforce India, ServiceNow, Snowflake, Databricks, MongoDB, Confluent), B2B Indian product companies (Freshworks, Postman, Atlan, Hasura, Chargebee), and the systems-integrator giants (TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Accenture) where the role sits closer to delivery. Top-tier Solutions Architects in India routinely cross ₹1Cr total comp by L6+ and the role is a common path into VP-Engineering and Field-CTO seats.

Prompt Engineers design, evaluate, and ship LLM-powered features — system prompts, RAG flows, agent orchestration, structured-output schemas, and the eval harnesses that prove a prompt is actually better. The role sits between product, applied ML, and software engineering: you write prompts the way other engineers write code, run cost-quality-latency trade-off experiments, instrument grader pipelines, and own the part of the product that the LLM actually 'speaks.' In India through 2026, the role is one of the fastest-growing AI hires — concentrated at AI-native startups (Sarvam AI, Krutrim, Ola Krutrim, Atlan, Yellow.ai), product SaaS shops with a serious AI feature surface (Freshworks, Postman, Chargebee, Whatfix, Zoho ZIA), fintechs (Razorpay, Cred, Paytm), and the GCCs of Microsoft, Google, Adobe, and Salesforce. The salary band is unusually wide because the title is new and JDs vary from 'wrote one ChatGPT integration' to 'owns the eval harness for a frontier model.' Sarvam AI made several public crore-level offers to senior prompt and LLM engineers in 2025.

Power Systems Engineers in India design and analyse the transmission and distribution infrastructure that moves electricity from generators to load centres — EHV substations (33/132/220/400/765 kV), HVDC corridors, interstate transmission lines, grid-code-compliant renewable integration (solar, wind, BESS), and smart-grid SCADA / IEC 61850 automation. The work is numerically intensive: load-flow, short-circuit (symmetrical and asymmetrical fault), transient-stability, and harmonic-analysis studies run on ETAP or DIgSILENT PowerFactory, and every result must withstand regulatory scrutiny from CEA, CERC / SERC, POSOCO, and SLDC. Employers span NTPC Transmission, PowerGrid Corporation (the national transmission backbone), state STUs and DISCOMs, private transmission developer-operators (Sterlite Power, Adani Transmission now merged into ATL, Torrent Power, Tata Power Transmission), renewable IPPs (ReNew Power, Greenko, Suzlon Energy's grid teams), and Siemens India, ABB India, and GE Vernova grid-automation divisions that design the GIS and relay panels. The role differs from a plant electrical engineer in scope: a power-systems engineer owns the network model, not just a single switchboard — they think in MW, MVAr, MVA, and km, not in motor HP and panel AMPS.

Senior: N/A

Watchmakers in India overhaul mechanical and quartz movements at authorised service centres (Titan, Ethos Watches, Johnson Watch Co.), independent repair workshops, and the small but growing Swiss-trained independent restorer segment represented by operations like TimeMakers Mumbai. The role demands complete movement disassembly — balance wheel, escapement, mainspring, keyless works, and complications — followed by ultrasonic cleaning, fresh lubrication to NIHS 91-10 specs, and rate regulation on a Witschi or Timegrapher 1000. The premium end involves Patek Philippe, Rolex, and Omega factory-authorised service, which requires WOSTEP (Watchmakers of Switzerland Training and Educational Program) certification or equivalent manufacturer schooling. Entry typically flows through Titan's in-house Watchmaking School in Hosur, which trains for Titan service centre roles, or through Craft Apprenticeship programs at independent workshops. HMT-trained watchmakers from the state enterprise era now predominantly run private practices in tier-2 cities.

Senior: N/A

Infrastructure engineers design, build, and own the compute, network, and storage substrate that everything else runs on — VPCs, bare-metal fleets, transit gateways, BGP peering, object and block storage tiers, IAM boundaries, and multi-region failover fabrics. Unlike DevOps (which automates the deploy pipeline on top of infra) or SRE (which keeps production reliable on top of infra), infra engineering is about the layer underneath: provisioning a 500-node compute fleet with Terraform and Pulumi, designing a hub-and-spoke network topology across 15 AWS accounts, or bridging a Jio on-prem data centre to GCP via Dedicated Interconnect. In India the role is most visible at Jio Platforms (running one of the world's largest hybrid infra estates), TCS Infra Services, Wipro Infrastructure Engineering, and the platform/infra pods at product unicorns like Flipkart, Razorpay, Swiggy, and CRED where a 10-person infra team may own thousands of EC2 instances and petabytes of S3 storage.

Senior: N/A

DRDO (Defence Research and Development Organisation) scientists are the technical backbone of India's indigenous weapons and defence systems programmes across 50+ laboratories under eight clusters — missiles (DRDL, RCI, ASL Hyderabad), avionics and UAVs (ADE, CABS Bengaluru), electronics warfare (DLRL, DEAL Dehradun), life sciences (INMAS, DIBER Delhi), armament (ARDE Pune), aeronautics (ADA, ADA Bengaluru for Tejas LCA), naval systems (NPOL Kochi, NRB Mumbai), and parachutes/safety systems (ADRDE Agra). Entry is via the RAC Scientist 'B' exam (formerly CEPTAM/SET) — a B.Tech with 60%+ or M.Tech qualifies for Scientist B (Pay Level 10, 7th CPC); most frontline labs also take PhD-qualified direct recruits into Scientist C or D. Scientists progress through B → C → D → E → F → G → Outstanding Scientist → Distinguished Scientist, with each senior grade requiring a competitive DPC review. At the apex sits the Chairman DRDO / Scientific Adviser to the Raksha Mantri (SA to RM), a Cabinet Secretary-rank appointment.

Senior: ₹30.0L

Data Platform Engineers build and operate the shared infrastructure that every data-producing and data-consuming team in the company depends on — Spark and Trino/Presto cluster management, Airflow/Dagster operator frameworks, Snowflake and Databricks tenancy governance, schema registries, data catalog and lineage tooling (DataHub, OpenMetadata, Atlan), and the SLOs that underpin all downstream analytics and ML work. The distinction from a Data Engineer is operational ownership: a Data Platform Engineer does not primarily author business pipelines but instead owns the platform those pipelines run on — cluster sizing, Spark executor config, Airflow scheduler tuning, warehouse credit budgets, access-control frameworks, and cost-attribution dashboards. In India the role has consolidated at petabyte-scale operators — Flipkart, Walmart Global Tech, Uber India, Razorpay, CRED, PhonePe, Swiggy, Zomato — and at the GCCs of global hyperscalers and banks where the Indian data platform team often owns a globally shared service.

Senior: N/A