GenAI engineers in the GCCs

A role across the GCC collection, all ten Parent Industries together.

The short answer

GenAI engineers build applications on large language models, such as assistants for staff, agents that carry out a task from start to end, search that answers questions from a company's own documents, and AI added to software that already exists. They are the third-largest single role in the GCC world, at about their weight at product companies, and the fastest-growing. Their share of GCC hiring more than doubled through the record, and in July to September 2026, when GCC hiring as a whole fell sharply, GenAI openings barely fell at all. The banks hold the most, above all JPMorganChase and Wells Fargo, but the role is a larger part of hiring at the healthcare companies, like Optum India and Carelon, and the insurers, like MetLife and The Hartford, where reading claims, policies and medical paperwork is the obvious first use. The centres that took on the parent's whole engineering function, like Wells Fargo, MetLife and The Hartford, hire GenAI more than the platform centres, like JPMorganChase and Walmart, do. It also has one of the widest doors at both ends. Entry-level and staff-level openings each take a larger share than across the GCCs, and MetLife and Wells Fargo hire juniors into GenAI more readily than anyone.

Where the work sits

The banks hold the most, at their usual weight.

Parent Industry 1, Inside the banks and financial institutions, posts more GenAI openings than all the other industries together. JPMorganChase posts the most of any centre, and its GenAI hiring grew in every quarter. Wells Fargo is second, then Commonwealth Bank, NatWest Group and Citi, and at Citi, Goldman Sachs and Capital One GenAI is an unusually large part of what the centre posts. (More on it in the banks' hiring, in Parent Industry 1.)

The healthcare companies hire it most of all, in proportion. In Parent Industry 5, GenAI is close to twice its GCC weight, at Optum India, Carelon, Amgen, Eli Lilly and Bristol Myers Squibb, and Pfizer's data and AI centre is mostly GenAI. (More on it in the healthcare companies' hiring, in Parent Industry 5.)

The insurers are close behind. In Parent Industry 2, Inside the insurers, GenAI is well above its GCC weight, almost all of it at MetLife and The Hartford. At The Hartford it is a larger part of hiring than at any other large centre in the GCC world.

Retail hires it below its weight.

Walmart is the third-largest GenAI employer among all centres, but GenAI is a small part of retail's hiring as a whole, and outside Walmart it is a minor role. (More on it in the retailers' hiring, in Parent Industry 3.)

Elsewhere it is small. In Parent Industry 10, JLL, the property firm, hires GenAI as one of its main roles, so the hotels, airlines and property firms hire it at about their weight. The carmakers and manufacturers, through Cargill and Ford, and the energy majors, through bp, SLB and Shell, hire it well below their weight, as do the logistics operators, through Maersk, DHL and UPS, and the telecom operators, through BT Group, Lumen Technologies and TMUS Global Solutions. The media groups do not hire it at all.

By mandate, GenAI leans to the whole-function centres. The centres that took on The whole engineering function, like Wells Fargo, MetLife, The Hartford, Citi and Carelon, hire GenAI well above their weight, because a centre that holds the parent's whole technology function is where the parent builds its AI. The centres Building the parent's apps and platforms, like JPMorganChase, Walmart, Optum India and Commonwealth Bank, hold slightly more of the role in all, but at a little under their weight. The data and AI centres, like Pfizer's, are the most GenAI-heavy of all. Centres Running the parent's own systems, like Mattel, hire it at well under their weight.

What the work is

The role comes in two main kinds. The larger is building GenAI applications, the assistants, agents and question-answering systems themselves. The other is adding AI to software that already exists, done by software engineers who also write the rest of the system. A handful of postings are for conversational AI, the chatbots and voice assistants.

Python is required in nearly every posting, and Java in a large minority, for the engineers who add AI to Java systems. The model tools are LangChain and LangGraph, the OpenAI API, Vertex AI, SageMaker and Hugging Face, with LlamaIndex for search over documents and MCP, the standard that lets an agent use other software. AWS, Azure and Google Cloud all appear, with Kubernetes, React and FastAPI for the rest of the application. Many postings also require PyTorch or TensorFlow. A large minority mention enterprise AI platforms, and a notable share require Responsible AI, the checks that keep a model's answers fair, explainable and within the rules.

The emphasis follows the industry and the mandate.

The banks lean most to Responsible AI and to running models on their own platforms, with Red Hat OpenShift and open models such as LLaMA, and to Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry.

The healthcare companies lean to AWS and to MLflow for tracking models, and their GenAI engineers often build the screens as well.

The insurers lean furthest to model work itself, with diffusion models, knowledge graphs, sentiment analysis and classical machine learning, on SageMaker, Azure OpenAI and Vertex AI.

The retailers lean most to adding AI to existing systems. Their GenAI postings require Java and Spring Boot, Node and Cassandra, the stack of Walmart's online store.

The carmakers and manufacturers lean to the OpenAI API and MCP, and the property firms to Amazon Bedrock.

The platform centres mostly add AI to existing software, while the whole-function centres mostly build GenAI applications from scratch, with more data science beside them.

Hyderabad holds a clearly larger share of GenAI than of GCC hiring, through the healthcare companies and the large American banks there, like Wells Fargo and JPMorganChase, and Mumbai a little more. Bengaluru and Chennai hold less of GenAI than of GCC hiring.

What is changing

These readings follow the record quarter by quarter, from October to December 2025, the third quarter of the financial year 2025-26, to July to September 2026, the second quarter of 2026-27. A longer record will show whether they last.

GenAI held up as GCC hiring fell

GCC hiring rose to April to June 2026 and fell sharply in July to September 2026. GenAI openings rose through April to June and then barely fell, so the role's share of GCC hiring rose in every quarter, from below its share at product companies in October to December 2025 to above it by July to September 2026.

JPMorganChase took the lead

JPMorganChase's GenAI openings grew in every quarter, while Wells Fargo's and Commonwealth Bank's fell after January to March 2026. The banks as a whole grew GenAI hiring in every quarter.

Responsible AI arrived

The share of GenAI postings requiring Responsible AI, and AI governance more broadly, roughly doubled in July to September 2026.

More AI added to existing systems

Postings for engineers who add AI to existing software grew as a part of the role in July to September 2026.

The agent standards cooled

MCP and the newer agent-to-agent protocol were required most often in January to March 2026 and less in each quarter after.

Persistently open roles

GenAI jobs stay open about as often as GCC jobs overall, a little less. When one is posted again, its first and last postings are typically about three weeks apart, and nine in ten are within about nine weeks.

The retailers keep GenAI jobs open far longer than anyone else. The banks, the healthcare companies and the insurers are close to the GCC rate.

Commonwealth Bank, Walmart, The Hartford and Carelon keep a large share of their GenAI jobs open again and again.

Optum India and NatWest Group rarely do, and JPMorganChase and Wells Fargo seldom do.

Staff-level GenAI jobs stay open longest by far. Entry-level ones are almost never posted twice.

The skills found most often in persistently open GenAI jobs are those of the data scientist, NumPy, Pandas, Scikit-learn, PyTorch and MLflow, with knowledge graphs, information retrieval, the FAISS vector index, Anthropic's Claude and the agent-to-agent protocol.

The door

GenAI's door is one of the widest among the large GCC roles at the bottom, and also the most senior at the top. Entry-level openings take about twice their GCC share, junior openings more than their GCC share, and staff-level openings a clearly larger share too. Mid-level openings are the ones that are scarcer.

The juniors are at Wells Fargo, JPMorganChase and MetLife, with Optum India behind. At MetLife, most GenAI openings are entry or junior.

The insurers take juniors more readily than any other industry, and the banks also take many.

The whole-function centres take juniors about twice as readily as the platform centres. The platform centres are the most staff-heavy part of the role.

The retailers take almost no GenAI juniors.

Commonwealth Bank, Citi and Carelon post no junior GenAI openings.

The junior share fell through 2026. It was highest in January to March 2026 and lowest in July to September 2026.

In one line

If you build with large language models in Python, GenAI is the GCC role that kept growing when the rest slowed, at the banks above all and most strongly in proportion at the healthcare companies and the insurers, with a door that is open to juniors at the large bank and insurer centres.

Terms used on this page

Mandate

The kind of work a parent company gives its engineering centre in India, such as building its apps and platforms, running its own systems, or testing software built elsewhere.

Responsible AI

The checks that keep a model's answers fair, explainable and within the rules, before and after it is put to use.

MCP and the agent-to-agent protocol

Two open standards for AI agents. MCP lets an agent use other software and data, and the agent-to-agent protocol lets agents built by different teams work together.

Back to the story

This page reads the openings. The story of the companies is on Global capability centres in India (GCCs).