They come in two broad kinds. Some are Indian companies building for Indian customers, such as PhonePe, Swiggy, Razorpay and Meesho. Others are global software companies, such as Salesforce, Atlassian, Adobe and Cisco, that run large engineering centres in India to build the products they sell everywhere. Unlike a GCC, such a centre builds the very product its company sells.
The work spans almost every layer of software. Some product companies build what other software stands on, such as networks, cloud platforms, databases, developer tools and AI models. Others build the software a business runs on, from finance and HR to sales and customer service. The rest build software for one industry, such as banking, health, shopping, media, manufacturing or education. That spread makes this the most varied of the five collections.
For an engineer, a product company differs from the other large employers in one important way. An
Every company named in this collection has posted software engineering jobs in India.
A product company builds something once and sells it many times. Salesforce sells its software to companies' sales teams, and Duolingo sells language lessons to people on their phones. Software used to be sold as a licence to install. Today it usually runs in the cloud and is paid for by the month, which the industry calls software as a service, or SaaS. Some companies give the app away and earn from what passes through it, such as a payment or an order. In every case the engineers build the thing the company sells.
Ingrid groups the companies that hire software engineers in India into five collections, one for each kind of employer. They are the product companies collection,
The product companies collection works like a map that zooms in. At its widest are eleven Domains, each a broad slice of the software industry, such as Fintech or Semiconductors and devices. Each Domain holds a few Industry Verticals, such as Payments or Edtech. Each Industry Vertical is divided into Market Segments, and a Market Segment is one kind of product with the companies that make it, such as the coaching apps that prepare students for entrance exams. Inside a Market Segment, companies are grouped into sub-segments by what exactly they sell.
The eleven Domains fall into two groups. Domains I to IV hold the companies that build what all software runs on and the software every business uses, whatever its industry. Domains V to X hold the companies that build software for one industry, from finance and health to shopping, media, chips and factories. Domain XI is different. It gathers several smaller industries that came to software late, such as property, education, law, government and farming, each too small to stand as a Domain of its own.
The companies that carry data between machines, connect a company's calls and messages, house the servers and guard all of it against attack belong here, like Cisco, Zoom, Equinix, Zscaler and CrowdStrike.
The cloud providers, the makers of operating systems and the companies that sell the tools engineers use to write, test, ship and monitor code sit here, like Red Hat, Nutanix, GitLab, Atlassian and Postman.
The companies that store data, move it, analyse it and sell it, and the AI labs that train models on it, make up this Domain, like MongoDB, Snowflake, Databricks and Sarvam.
Every department of a company, from finance and HR to marketing, sales, customer service and IT, runs on software from here, sold by companies like SAP, Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow and Freshworks.
The software through which money is paid, lent, banked, invested and insured is built here, by companies like Razorpay, PhonePe, Bajaj Finserv, FIS and Guidewire Software.
Software for patient care, health insurance and billing, hospitals and their machines, and the making of medicines comes from here, from companies like Practo, Innovaccer, PharmEasy, Philips and Veeva Systems.
Online shopping, the software retailers run on, food delivery, travel booking and the supply chain are covered here, through companies like Flipkart, Meesho, Swiggy, MakeMyTrip and Delhivery.
Games, streaming, news and social media, and the advertising that pays for them, are made here by companies like Electronic Arts (EA), JioHotstar, ShareChat, Pocket FM and InMobi Advertising.
The chips inside every machine, the tools that design them and the devices built around them come from companies like NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Whirlpool and Zebra Technologies.
Factories, vehicles, aircraft and power grids all run on software from here, built by companies like Rockwell Automation, Caterpillar Inc., Ather Energy, Airbus and GE Vernova.
This Domain brings together the industries that ran on paper, files and face-to-face work long after banking and shopping went online, and are now catching up. Property, education, law, government and farming each have an Industry Vertical here, served by companies like Procore Technologies, Pearson, Icertis, OpenGov Inc. and SatSure.
AI models are changing what product companies build. A help desk now answers the customer before a person does, a contract tool reads the contract, and a coding tool writes code beside the engineer. Companies in every Domain are rebuilding their products around these models, and a new kind of company sells the models themselves.