A GCC is the parent company's engineering back office. It does work that the company would otherwise do at its headquarters. That includes running the internal systems that finance, HR and operations depend on, testing and maintaining software, and building the apps and platforms that customers use. In the more mature centres it also covers engineering the company's products and its data and AI work. The parent does not sell software. It sells loans, insurance, groceries, cars or medicines, and it needs a great deal of software to do so. The GCC is where the company builds and runs that software.
Global companies originally came to India to lower the cost of routine technology work. They stayed and grew because India could supply engineers at a scale no other country matched, and because each centre that proved itself with one kind of work was trusted with the next. Centres are now often given new work simply because the people who can build it are in India. Over the years, many centres have moved from supporting the headquarters to owning platforms and products of their own, and the largest now describe themselves as the parent's second home.
For an engineer, a GCC sits between the two other large employers in the industry. Unlike an IT services firm, which builds software for many clients, a GCC works for one company and stays with that company's systems for years. Unlike a product company, it does not sell what it builds, so its software serves the parent's own business, whether that is a trading desk, a supply chain or a hospital network. IT services firms are covered in the
This collection covers the GCCs of global companies in ten industries, and each industry is one Parent Industry. Every centre named in this collection has posted software engineering jobs in India.
A GCC rarely starts with its parent's most important work. It starts with work that is easy to hand over, and earns the next, harder kind by doing the last one well. Across industries the pattern repeats, from keeping the parent's internal systems running, through testing, to building the apps and platforms customers use, and in time to carrying a whole engineering function or the product itself. This path is called the arc, and each step on it is a stage.
The kind of work a centre is given is called its mandate. Each mandate sits at one stage of the arc, and the stages fall into four broad phases, called efficiency, capability, transformation and global hub.
The parent's IT department, moved to India, keeping finance, customer records, IT requests and the reports regulators ask for running. It is the easiest work to hand over.
A centre that checks the parent's software rather than writing it.
The centre builds what the parent's customers use, the app, the platform and the cloud they run on. This is the most common mandate in the collection.
The centre does every kind of work at once and looks like the parent in miniature.
Research and development for the parent's physical product, such as the software inside a car. Only carmakers and manufacturers have this mandate.
A centre that works like a software company with several product lines, serving more than one of the parent's businesses across the world.
A centre built in India from the start for data and AI work. It is the newest mandate, but it is built around one special skill, so it belongs with capability.
A centre whose work fits none of these yet is listed under No single mandate yet. Companies not yet placed under a mandate, usually those with only a small presence in India so far, appear on each Parent Industry's page under The names with a desk here.
A famous parent's name does not say what its Indian centre does. A centre that builds the parent's apps usually builds them, but does not decide what to build. That is decided at the headquarters. The distance between how famous the parent's name is and the kind of work a centre actually does is the reputation gap.
The gap is widest at stage 4, where the whole engineering function moved offshore. The same building can hold the parent's trading platform and its help desk. The name on the door does not say which floor a job is on.
- Big tech companies, such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon, are covered in their own collection. (More on them in the
big-tech collection .) - India's own companies that build their own technology, such as India's banks, are covered in the
product-companies collection . - IT services firms, including those that run parts of a GCC for its parent, are covered in the
services-world collection .
In every industry, centres are moving up the arc. A centre that once carried out what the headquarters decided now owns a platform outright: the product decisions, not only the engineering. The largest centres describe themselves as the parent's second home, not its offshore site. The newest centres are built this way from the start. AI models are changing the picture too. The work that came to India first, like testing and routine support, is the work AI reaches first. The same centres are also where many parents now build their AI. There is a counter-current as well: some parents hand parts of their centre to an IT services firm to run.
The world's big banks sit in it, like JPMorganChase, Barclays, HSBC, Deutsche Bank and ANZ.
Here are the foreign insurers and brokers, like MetLife, Allstate, Chubb, Swiss Re and Marsh McLennan.
It covers the chains and the brands they stock, like Walmart, Target, Tesco, IKEA and Procter & Gamble.
Carmakers share it with the makers of everything else, like Ford, Stellantis, Volvo Cars, Sony and Cargill.
Drugmakers and American healthcare-services companies meet here, like Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Optum, Carelon and Evernorth.
Parcel carriers, shipping lines and distributors fill this one, like UPS, DHL, Maersk and Cardinal Health.
Its centres belong to oil majors and the firms that serve them, like Chevron, Shell, bp, SLB and Halliburton.
Foreign operators taking their software back, like T-Mobile US, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom, BT and Telstra, have built centres here.
Studios, TV networks and publishers make up this one, like Warner Bros. Discovery, Comcast, Disney, Fox and Dow Jones.
Everyone else lands here, like Marriott, Delta, United, JLL and CBRE.
Much of the engineering in this collection goes into business platforms, the software a large company buys rather than builds and then has set up, extended and kept running. Beside the pages for each Parent Industry, the collection follows each of these platforms across every centre.