They sell engineering to companies that make things. A carmaker designing a new model needs thousands of engineers for three years, and a few hundred afterwards. An aircraft maker, a chip company, or a maker of medical devices or factory equipment has the same kind of need.

The engineering-services firm supplies the engineers, by the team and by the year, for the parts of the design the manufacturer chooses to hand over:

A manufacturer hands over parts of a design, and the engineering-services firm sends back engineers by the team and by the year. The work covers controller software, chip verification, safety testing and the hardware engineering around them, all done to the manufacturer's standard.

• the software in a controller
• checking that a chip design works, called verification
• testing embedded software against a safety standard
• the mechanical and electrical engineering around them

The promise is engineering to the manufacturer's standard. In cars and aircraft, that standard is written into law. So the work is documented, reviewed and certified in ways a web app never is.

The clients are manufacturers: carmakers and their suppliers, aircraft and defence makers, chip companies, and makers of medical devices and industrial equipment. They include the engineering centres these manufacturers have opened in India, which are among the largest employers of embedded engineers in the country. (More on them in Parent Industry 4, Inside the manufacturers and carmakers, in the GCC collection.)

The car is the largest client here. A modern car carries a hundred or more controllers, and more software than an airliner. Carmakers never had enough engineers to write it all, so for twenty years they have handed a large part of it to firms like these, mostly working from Bengaluru and Pune.

Pure automotive firms do almost nothing but embedded work for cars:

Their work covers the controllers, the network inside the vehicle, AUTOSAR, the industry standard car software is built to, and the tools carmakers test with.

Broader engineering firms have the car as their largest line among several:

This is also where the name does not tell you the job. At a broad engineering firm, one engineer may work on a car's brakes while another works on a TV set-top box.

The work is embedded C and C++ on a controller with only a few kilobytes of memory. It includes the vehicle's internal network, real-time operating systems, which must respond within a fixed time, and test rigs that simulate a whole car around the software. It is a different kind of engineering from the web work in the rest of this collection. Demand for it is rising as the car becomes a computer.

Before a chip is made, it exists as a description written in a hardware description language, and as a very large amount of testing. A growing share of that description and testing is done in Bengaluru, by firms that do it for chip companies.

This work needs electronics engineers who know a hardware description language and a chip's interfaces. Few courses teach it, so these firms train many of their own engineers. India's push to design and make chips at home, and the chip companies' own Indian centres, have made those engineers scarce. The chip companies themselves are covered in the product-companies collection. (More on them in Industry Vertical 35, Semiconductors and chip design, in the product-companies collection.)

The third kind of client is everything else that is engineered: the aircraft, the medical device, and the factory with its machines.

The regulator shapes this work. Software for aircraft and medical devices is written to standards that require every requirement to be traced to a test, every change to be reviewed, and the whole system to be certified before it flies or is used on a patient. So the work is slower, more documented and heavier on testing than in any other part of the services world, and these firms hire many testers and verification engineers. It is also the steadiest engineering here, because a certified system is not rewritten lightly.

In aircraft and medical devices, every requirement is traced to a test, every change is reviewed, and the whole system is certified before it is used. That makes the work slower and heavier on testing, but also the steadiest engineering in this part of the services world.

Largest first, by size in India. The large Indian firms each have fifteen to forty thousand people.

Every client of these firms is covered in the product-companies collection:

The engineers in this Company Tier work as the manufacturers' extended workforce. The manufacturers' own engineering centres in India hire from these firms directly.