Databricks to increase India headcount and launch new R&D hub this year

American enterprise software company Databricks is planning to increase its headcount in India by at least 50% and has also said that it is opening a new research and development (R&D) hub in Bengaluru. 

Besides, the new R&D hub in Bengaluru which will look into product engineering and product innovation, supporting the company’s global offerings. The company said that the 50% increase in the workforce does not include any roles for the R&D hub. The company has five other such hubs in San Francisco, Mountain View, Seattle, Amsterdam, and Berlin.

The company is increasingly seeing interest in its offerings in India from various sectors such as financial services, retail, e-commerce, healthcare, insurance, and utilities among others.

Companies such as InMobi, Swiggy, Dream11, Air India, MakeMyTrip, Meesho, Narayana Health, Myntra, CRED, Parle and others leverage Databricks' lakehouse platform for business optimisation and innovation. The lakehouse platform is an open and unified data management architecture that combines the flexibility, cost-efficiency and scalability of data lakes with the data management features of data warehouses, enabling business intelligence (BI) and machine learning (ML) on all data. 
The company also has nearly 100 partners in India including EY, Deloitte, Accenture, Tech Mahindra, Infosys, TCS, Wipro, LTI, to name a few. 

For a decade, Databricks has focused on democratising data and AI for organizations and earlier this week, Databricks said it was in the process of acquiring AI-centric data governance platform provider Okera for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition is expected to boost Databricks’ data governance capabilities while training and managing large language models (LLMs) in their businesses, such as ChatGPT in November 2022 and the company’s Dolly 2.0, released in April this year, the company said.  

"I firmly believe that data and AI adoption will accelerate our country’s transformation to help India become the most data-driven economy by transforming enterprises to become more data- forward,” said Anil Bhasin, vice president and country manager for Databricks India. He further added that the company has been experiencing nearly 90% year-on-year growth in the Asia Pacific region. 

The company appointed Bhasin in August last year as vice president and country manager for Databricks India. He joined the firm from UiPath where he served as the managing director and VP of the company's India and South Asia business. 

Databricks’ India division started operations in 2019 and currently has 250 employees. The increase in headcount will see Databricks India expanding its local team of technical specialists, sales and support engineers, among others.

The company’s decision to hire new recruits comes when technology and other companies in the US have laid off employees due to weak economic outlook. The latest job cuts include Twitter, Amazon, Meta, Google, IBM, Accenture and most recently, Cognizant and many more. 

Also, India is becoming one of the largest R&D hub for many tech companies in recent years, only next to their headquarters, which experts believe is, due to the country’s huge availability of talent and competitive salaries. To be sure, in February this year, Chinese Smartphone maker, Realme, announced the opening of a research and development (R&D) centre in India. 

Last month, travel technology solutions provider Amadeus opened its new engineering site in Pune to help expand the company’s R&D activities in the country, along with ramping up hiring in the country. The company already has one R&D site in Bengaluru. 

Sindhu Gangadharan, managing director of SAP Labs India and senior vice president of User Enablement at SAP, also said in an interview with Tech Circle in November last year that SAP Labs India is the second-largest SAP development location after Walldorf and also the largest core research and development (R&D) hub for the company.