Meta made headlines last month for announcing plans to cut 5% of its employees, controversially deeming them “low performers.” But the job cuts aren’t holding Meta back from expanding in certain geographic areas.
Meta is setting up a new site in the country’s tech hub of Bengaluru (formerly known as Bangalore), multiple Meta employees posted on LinkedIn this month.
Meta is currently hiring for 41 positions there, according to its careers webpage, most of which were posted over the last month. The positions are split between software or machine learning engineer jobs, and roles focused on designing chips for Meta’s data centers.
Meta Bengaluru is looking for an “experienced Engineering Director to build and lead our engineering team in India,” one of Meta’s job ads, which was posted three weeks ago on LinkedIn, reads.
The engineering director in Bengaluru will be responsible for designing a strategy to hire and build founding engineering teams, plus help create “a vision for engineer teams in India,” the job ad states.
The new center is part of Meta’s Enterprise Engineering team, according to a Meta employee’s LinkedIn post. That team focuses on custom internal Meta tools, rather than on Meta’s best-known products like Facebook and Instagram.
While Meta has several existing offices in India, including Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Gurgaon, New Delhi, and Mumbai, most have fewer job openings and they’re mainly for non-engineering roles. Only 1 of the 12 available positions at the other locations is engineering-related, Meta’s careers page shows.
A Meta spokesperson in India told TechCrunch that it is recruiting for a “small number of engineering positions in Bengaluru.”
“We regularly update our location strategies to support our long-term investments,” the spokesperson said.
The 41 positions in Bangalore are a small proportion of Meta’s global job postings, which currently total over 1,700. But it represents a shift for Meta, which has not traditionally used India as an engineering hub — those positions have historically been based in North America and Europe.
In one example from 2022, an Indian software engineer made headlines after he was laid off by Meta just two days after relocating to Canada for the job.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that Meta intends to backfill the jobs it cut during its most recent round of layoffs.