Meta to build engineering teams in India with new Bengaluru office

Meta, which entered India in 2010, currently has offices in Gurugram, New Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, comprising teams from its various products such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Facebook parent Meta is opening a new office in Bengaluru and hiring for engineering and product roles in the city, widely regarded as the country’s tech capital.

With this, the social networking giant will be following in the footsteps of its Big Tech rivals such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon who have built product and engineering teams in the city and across the country.

Earlier this week, Google opened a new Bengaluru campus called Ananta, one of the tech giant's largest offices worldwide, that will comprise teams from various Google units including Google Deepmind, Android, Search, Pay, Cloud, Maps, and Play among others.

Meta, which entered India in 2010, currently has offices in Gurugram, New Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, comprising teams from its various products such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

However, most employees work in functions like sales, marketing, business development and partnerships, operations, policy, legal, and finance, among others.

For the new Bengaluru office, Meta is seeking to hire an engineering director who will be responsible for developing a strategy to hire and build founding engineering teams while playing a key role in shaping its future engineering presence in the country, as per a job listing on the company website.

Meta is also looking for software engineers who can help build “next-generation” products that can help the company “connect the next billion people” as well as create new features that have “billions of interactions per day’, as per the company's job listings viewed by Moneycontrol.

According to a few posts by Meta employees on LinkedIn, the Bengaluru centre is being set up by Meta’s enterprise engineering team that builds products for the company’s internal teams to help them increase productivity.

The job listings also indicate that the company is recruiting hardware engineers who can support its growing infrastructure initiatives, including its data center operations and custom chip efforts, for its AI workloads. The development was first reported by TechCrunch.

"We regularly update our location strategies to support our long- term investments. As part of this, we are recruiting for a small number of engineering positions in Bengaluru" a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.

Biggest user market

Building a product and engineering centre will likely mark a key milestone for Meta's journey in India, its largest user market with over a billion users across its family of products.

The country has been a key market for the social networking giant to test several of its features and creator tools before a broader rollout into other markets. India was the first market where Instagram Reels had its first broad rollout in July 2020, just after the rival TikTok was banned in the country.

Read: Meta India head Sandhya Devanathan on why India is a key market for WhatsApp Business, AI initiatives

Over the past year, Meta has also been courting India's rapidly growing AI developer base to drive the adoption of its Llama family of large language models through various developer outreach and awareness building initiatives.

This includes a Llama Hackathon in October 2024 and a partnership with IT industry body National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) to launch an open-source generative AI challenge for startups and developers in July 2024.

India has become a crucial market for Llama's adoption, driving a large portion of its 650 million downloads by the end of 2024. Llama 3.1, which was released in July 2024, also included support for Hindi language, enabling local developers to customise it and fine-tune it based on their needs.

These steps come as the race to dominate the hyper-competitive AI sector intensifies among major tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, which are also seeking to woo the country's developer community through a range of initiatives.

Meta has also been ramping up its AI infrastructure spending globally, planning to invest $60 billion to $65 billion in capital expenditures (CapEx) to strengthen its AI efforts in 2025.

Last month, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg said during the company's earnings call that they will invest "hundreds of billions of dollars" in AI infrastructure over the long term. "I continue to think that investing very heavily in CapEx and infrastructure is going to be a strategic advantage over time," he said.