Airbnb’s March 12 announcement of a new global tech hub in Bengaluru came over a year into the US-based company’s recruitment shake-up in India.
The total number of job openings at the vacation lodgings marketplace in the country increased from a mere six roles in March 2021 to 37 by March 10, 2022, according to analytics firm GlobalData. Between December 2020 and now, it has posted nearly 100 jobs across its three India offices located in New Delhi, Gurugram, and Bengaluru.
“Our new Bengaluru hub will enable us to work with some of the brightest tech talent in India while allowing Airbnb to continue to evolve our technical foundations and build truly exceptional experiences for guests and hosts on the platform,” Airbnb’s chief technology officer Ari Balogh said, announcing the new hub last Saturday.
Though the company has been operating in India since 2017, hiring appears to have become more robust since its IPO in December 2020, according to GlobalData.
“Interestingly, since Airbnb went public, the company’s job postings in India are second to the US where it predominantly recruits,” Ajay Kumar Thalluri, GlobalData’s business fundamentals analyst, told Quartz.
Who is Airbnb hiring in India?
For Airbnb, India is a prominent destination for hiring software engineers and programmers, among other professionals.
“One of the key areas for which Airbnb is hiring is for its ‘Cities’ team in Bengaluru for developing a portal that enables government officials to manage compliance around home-sharing regulations,” Thalluri says. The company is also hiring tech talent to build backend services for payments compliance, automation tools, and recruiting analytics, among other things, he added.
Given the STEM worker shortage in the US, companies have been looking east for cheap but high-quality talent to build global solutions. For instance, Uber first built a pared-down lite version of its app in India and took it to over a dozen other nations. The ride-hailing firm’s global fintech team also sits in Hyderabad. Another reason to hire in India is to grow locally, like in the case of London-based neo-bank Tide.
“Going by the recent listings for recruitment-related roles, Airbnb could hire new engineering, data scientists, and analyst staff for specific functions and service areas,” Thalluri said.