This is the oldest and largest part of India's software industry. It grew when companies in America and Europe found they could have software built and maintained in India at lower cost, and it is still where many engineering graduates in India begin their careers, often straight from campus.
The work spans almost everything software touches. Services firms modernise old systems and move them to the cloud, build new apps and platforms, test software, keep servers and networks running, set up business platforms such as SAP and Salesforce, and engineer the software inside cars and chips. Their close relatives, the BPO and KPO firms, run whole business processes for clients, such as customer support or accounting, and employ engineers to build the software and automation behind them.
For an engineer, a services firm differs from the other two large kinds of employer in one important way. A
Every firm named in this collection has posted software engineering jobs in India.
An IT services firm sells time, in teams, with a promise attached. A client, such as a bank, a retailer or an airline, would rather pay a firm a rate for each engineer than hire, train and manage the engineers itself. The firm supplies the engineers, manages them, and promises the work will be done on time.
The firm's profit is the gap between what the client pays for an engineer and what the engineer costs. That one fact explains much of how these firms run: why they hire freshers in large numbers, why teams are built as a pyramid with many juniors at the bottom, and why engineers sometimes wait between projects.
The firms in this collection are grouped into ten Company Tiers, by the kind of firm they are.
India's largest IT services firms, such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro and Accenture, which hire more freshers than any other kind of employer.
Indian firms, and American firms whose engineers are in India, such as Mphasis, Coforge and Persistent. Each is a specialist.
Large services firms from Europe and Japan, such as CGI, NTT DATA and Fujitsu, well known abroad and quiet in India.
Firms that keep other companies' servers, networks, mainframes and laptops running, such as Kyndryl.
Firms that sell a build, a new product or platform built by a small team, such as EPAM and Thoughtworks.
Firms that engineer the software inside cars, chips and devices, such as Tata Elxsi and KPIT.
The engineering arms of consulting firms, such as Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG.
Firms that sell one skill and nothing else, such as testing, SAP, data engineering, cloud, security, embedded software, or preparing data for AI models.
The smallest firms in the collection.
Firms like Genpact, WNS and Concentrix that run other companies' processes, such as customer support, billing, accounting and analytics, with engineers building the software and automation behind them.
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 Company Tier, the collection follows each of these platforms across every firm.
A services firm's name tells a reader about the firm: its size, its pay, its training and its stability. It does not tell a reader about the work. The work is decided by the account, the client project an engineer is placed on. The account decides the technology, the pace, the working hours and how much there is to learn.
So two engineers who join the same firm on the same day can, a year later, be doing completely different work.
Much of the services business rests on work that can be divided up and done cheaply: the component, the test suite, the support ticket, the code written to a specification. That is the work AI models do first. Every large firm now sells its clients automation of exactly that work, and expects fewer juniors per team. Skills like testing and preparing data for AI models are changing fastest. At the same time, firms are building new AI units, and new roles with AI in their title are appearing inside ordinary client projects.