Below every firm in the other Company Tiers sits a layer of small companies that build software for other companies. Most have a few hundred people, and many have fewer.
The giants' model does not run at this size. A firm of three hundred people has:
What it has is a founder, a handful of clients, and work that a junior does all of, rather than a slice of. That makes the small shop a fast place to learn every part of building software, and a place with little protection when a client leaves. The two facts have the same cause.
Every firm named here has posted software engineering jobs in India.
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Five more sections are on this page: What these firms sell, and to whom, What small means, Breadth fast, and the risk in the client list, The well-regarded boutiques and the ordinary ones, and The firms. Sign in to read them here, in full.
Continue with Google- What these firms sell, and to whom
- What small means
- Breadth fast, and the risk in the client list
- The well-regarded boutiques and the ordinary ones
- The firms
They sell whatever the client needs built, by a small team, at a price a large firm would not quote.
The clients are:
- start-ups with no engineers of their own
- mid-sized companies with a product to build or a system to modernise
- American and European businesses too small for a firm like EPAM, and in too much of a hurry for a giant
The small shop sells them a team of three to fifteen people, who take the work from the first call to the launch. The promise is the founder's own. The price is what makes the model work: a small shop charges a fraction of what a giant or a build shop charges for a comparable engineer.
The larger firms here include:
"Small" covers a wide range. The typical firm here has a few hundred people, and about a quarter have fewer than two hundred. A firm of three hundred hires perhaps twenty engineers a year, some of them straight from college. A few firms here are larger, with over a thousand people each:
Being small shapes the work:
Breadth comes from team size. A team of five building a client's product cannot specialise. So a junior on it may write the backend on Monday, the front end on Tuesday, release the software on Wednesday, and join the client call on Thursday. After two years, they have done every part of a software project. A junior in a giant's pyramid, who owns one component of one account, usually has not.
The risk is in the client list. A shop of two hundred people usually has five to ten clients, and one or two of them bring in most of its revenue. When that client cuts its budget, runs out of start-up funding, or takes the work in-house, the shop can lose a third of its business in a month. With no bench and no other lines of business, it has nowhere to put the engineers who worked on that client. That is behind the small shop's typical failures: the sudden layoff, the delayed salary, and the founder who cannot say what next month's work is.
This is also where the name does not tell you the job. A small firm's website may present a product studio, while most of its work is placing its engineers inside another company's team.
A few small shops have reputations that carry weight at product companies. What sets them apart can be seen from outside:
Most of the firms here are ordinary shops. An ordinary shop is not a bad employer. It is a small business doing ordinary work for ordinary clients. It shows the opposite marks: no public engineering voice, small or unnamed clients, a short phone call before an offer, and engineers who stay for a year or two.
Between the two sits a third kind: a firm that is really a staffing firm, placing engineers with clients, under a software-development name.
The larger firms:
Firms with over a thousand people each:
Also named here:
About a hundred more small firms make up the rest of this Company Tier.
The path from a small shop to a product company is the oldest in Indian software. A shop builds something for a client, keeps the right to it, and turns it into a product it sells to others. Several firms here are part of the way along that path. AI is changing small shops faster than the giants, in both directions. A team of five building with AI can do the work of eight, so a small shop can bid for work it could not staff before. That is why shops that build with AI, such as
Who these firms hire, role by role, is on the collection's role pages for Java backend and full-stack engineers, cloud and DevOps engineers, data engineers, test engineers, frontend and mobile engineers, .NET engineers, GenAI engineers, embedded, systems and chip engineers and the smaller roles.