“AI engineer” now covers several jobs. At a model company it means training infrastructure and evaluation. At an applied AI startup it means building agents that call tools, handle messy inputs and keep working once customers depend on them. At a larger product company it often means wiring language models into an existing product. The titles vary just as much: Agent Engineer, Applied AI Engineer, Forward-Deployed AI Engineer, ML Engineer, SDE II - Gen AI.

So a search for the exact phrase misses half the openings, and many lists you find online are months old. Below is a set of roles that were live when we checked them on 14 October 2026. After it come the places to search, how to read a listing, and how to reach the founders of small AI startups, who often hire before they post anything.

Which companies are hiring AI engineers in India right now?

These are the roles we found live on each company’s own job board on 14 October 2026. Each one appeared in the company’s public job board feed that day and its listing page loaded. It is a sample, not a census, and it is in no particular order within each group. Roles close and new ones open every week, so open the listing before you plan around it.

AI engineer roles open to candidates in India or remote, live on 14 October 2026
CompanyRole, as titledLocation and setupExperience the listing asks for
AI startups, India
Sarvam AIAgent EngineerBengaluru, on-siteHiring “from 3+ years of experience”
Sarvam AIML Engineer (Training Infra), Foundational ModelsBengaluru, on-site3+ years on ML training infrastructure or large distributed systems
ComposioMember Technical Staff - Applied AI Engineer (US Timing)Bengaluru, on-site, US working hours2 to 4 years
TrueFoundrySenior AI/ML Engineer: LLM & Agent StackBengaluru4 to 10 years of software engineering
Bolna AIAI Solutions EngineerBengaluru, on-siteNo years stated; serious hands-on prompting of LLMs to build things
Observe.AIAI Agent EngineerHyderabad1 to 5 years in conversational AI, solution engineering or LLM applications
Larger tech companies, India
HackerRankSenior Machine Learning EngineerBangalore, hybrid5+ years shipping ML systems in production
TuringForward-Deployed AI EngineerBengaluru (also listed for Hyderabad), hybrid, 3 days a week in office8+ years
MeeshoEngineering Manager – AI EngineeringBangalore, on-site9+ years, including 2+ managing engineers
MindtickleAI Product EngineerPune or Bengaluru, hybrid3+ years of Python development
GlanceSDE II - Gen AIBangaloreNo years stated; image generation, LoRA training and fine-tuning work
CourseraSenior Software Engineer, Applied AI and Customer SolutionsIndia, with travel to customer sites5+ years in software engineering
Remote or remote-first, open to India
AtlanPrincipal Software Engineer - Agent & App PlatformIndia, marked remote14+ years
GitLabStaff Software Engineer - NLPListed for Bangalore; GitLab describes a “remote-first, asynchronous organization”Staff level; deep backend architecture experience
SupabaseAI Platform Engineer“Remote, Global”Has shipped production LLM agent systems that other people depended on
CanonicalPython and Kubernetes Software Engineer - Data, Workflows, AI/ML & Analytics“Home based - Worldwide”Not stated as years in the listing

Two things stand out. First, the remote rows are senior: Atlan asks for 14+ years, and Supabase wants someone who has already run agent systems in production. Second, several India-based roles are tied to other markets. Composio’s listing says “WORK HOURS: US Timings” for a Bengaluru seat, and Coursera’s role involves travel to customer sites.

The demand behind these openings is real. Naukri’s JobSpeak report for September 2026, published on 6 October, says “AI/ML roles continued to record growth, rising 20% YOY in September”, and that “within the IT sector, AI/ML hiring grew 11% YOY, even as overall IT hiring declined.” The same report says “Fresher AI/ML hiring grew 19%, while the 4-7 years band remained stable”, and that AI/ML hiring for people with 13 to 16 years of experience grew 54%. The growth is real, and it leans toward experienced people.

Can you get a remote AI engineer job from India?

Yes, though in our sample they were fewer than on-site roles and more senior. Of the 16 roles above, four are remote or at a remote-first company. Two of those are staff or principal level, and a third wants someone who has already run agent systems in production.

The wording on the listing is what tells you whether India counts:

  • “Remote, Global” or “Worldwide” usually means the company hires across countries. Supabase’s listing says “We hire globally” and “There are no Supabase offices”. Canonical’s says its teams are “home-based and in multiple time zones”.
  • “Remote” with India named means remote inside India. Atlan’s listing is marked remote with India as its location and offers “Work from anywhere with a diverse team across 15+ countries”.
  • “Remote (US)” on YC’s job board means remote inside the US. Several YC listings carry India in their title but “Remote (US)” in the location line, so read both, and read the visa line under it.
  • “Remote (IN)” on YC’s board is the one to look for. On 14 October, YC’s remote software engineer page showed listings such as WarpBuild’s Senior Network Engineer at “IN / Remote (IN)”, and Ressl AI’s software engineering intern role, tagged AI engineer, at “Bengaluru, KA, IN / Bengaluru, Karnataka, IN / Remote (IN)”.
  • An India office with US hours, like Composio’s, is not remote, but it is the setup to expect from US-funded startups that have built a team in Bengaluru.

If the listing is unclear, ask before you apply. “Is this role open to someone based in India, as an employee or a contractor?” is a fair question, and the answer saves you a long process that ends at the offer stage.

What do AI engineer listings in India actually ask for?

Read past the title. The listings above ask for three different kinds of person.

Builders of agents for customers. Sarvam’s Agent Engineer listing says its agents “go into live operation at India’s largest banks, insurers, NBFCs and government departments”. It asks for people who have “worked with LLMs and agents seriously. Context engineering, tool use, structured outputs, memory, and the failure modes that only show up at scale.” Observe.AI’s AI Agent Engineer writes and refines prompts for LLM-driven agents and works with customers. Turing’s forward-deployed role asks for “Hands-on agentic AI experience”. This is the largest group, and the one where a public project counts most.

Infrastructure and model people. Sarvam’s training-infrastructure role names Megatron, DeepSpeed, PyTorch, vLLM, Triton and NCCL as the open-source projects where contributions count. Meesho’s AI engineering manager role is about the inference stack and optimising open-weight models. Glance’s Gen AI role is image generation and fine-tuning. These need depth you can show in code.

Product engineers who add AI. Mindtickle’s AI Product Engineer splits the work into parts, including “AI Engineering (30%): Implementing Agentic workflows, RAG architectures, and LLMs”. This is the most open door for a backend engineer moving into AI: you need strong Python and API work first, and real LLM work second.

Sarvam’s Agent Engineer listing also says something worth keeping in mind for every application: “What matters more than years is whether you have built something real users depended on and kept it working.” A small agent that people outside your team use, with its failure cases written up, says more than a certificate.

Where should you search for AI engineer jobs in India?

Use four places, in this order.

  1. Company job boards. Many AI startups host their openings on Ashby, Greenhouse or Lever, and every role in the table came from one of these. The boards follow a pattern you can open directly, such as jobs.ashbyhq.com followed by the company name, or job-boards.greenhouse.io followed by the company name. A web search for an AI title plus “Bengaluru” restricted to those domains turns up roles that never reach the big portals.
  2. YC’s job pages. YC’s India page presents its companies as fast-growing and hiring across every kind of role, and each listing names the founder you would be talking to. For remote roles, use the remote software engineer page and look for “Remote (IN)” in the location line.
  3. Wellfound. Its remote section labels each listing’s scope, such as “Remote only • Everywhere” or “Remote only • United States”, and company cards show headcount and stage. On Wellfound you apply role by role, to founders and hiring managers.
  4. Naukri and LinkedIn for the larger companies, where most hiring still runs through a recruiter. For a ten-person AI startup, these are usually the slowest route.

If you are also open to non-AI roles at early startups, startups hiring in Bangalore has a dated sample from Wellfound and YC, and startup job sites for remote roles compares the boards.

How do you know an AI engineer role is still open?

Three checks take five minutes and can save you a take-home assignment for a role that has already closed.

  • The listing loads on the company’s own board. Aggregators keep closed roles up for weeks. If the Ashby, Greenhouse or Lever page is gone, the role is gone.
  • The posting’s age. YC’s job pages show how long ago each role went up, for example “about 2 months ago” on one India-tagged listing on 14 October. An old posting with no news from the company is a warning.
  • The company is still moving. A launch, a funding round or a new hire in the last month means someone is still building the team.

This is also why a list like the one above goes stale quickly. Bookmark the boards, not the list.

How do you reach AI startup founders before a role is posted?

Write to them directly. At an AI startup with fifteen people, the founder or CTO usually makes the hiring call, and the first sign they are hiring is often a funding announcement or a launch, not a job post. A short note tying your work to what they just shipped lands while the hiring plan is still in the founder’s head.

By hand, that means watching YC batches, Product Hunt, funding news and GitHub every morning, finding the founder’s address, writing a specific note, sending it, following up a few days later and tracking the replies. It is useful work, and it is easy to drop after a week.

Reaching AI founders in the week they raise or launch

Backdoor runs that loop for you, over iMessage or WhatsApp. Give it your LinkedIn, a resume or a voice note, and after it has read up on your background it asks what you are after; that is where you say applied AI or agent work at seed-stage companies. Each morning it scans funding news, YC batches, Product Hunt launches, GitHub, Crunchbase, TechCrunch, Wellfound and company careers pages for startups that have just raised, launched or started hiring. An AI startup gives off exactly those signals before it posts a role.

For each startup it picks, Backdoor looks up the founder’s address and drafts a note on why you fit. Nothing is sent until you approve it, which is your chance to add the line no tool can write, such as the eval harness you built or the latency you cut. The approved note leaves from your Gmail, Backdoor keeps nudging in that thread until a founder answers, and it texts you when one does.

Much of this costs nothing. Matching, profile research, resume help and partner intros cost nothing, and the hiring sheet is free too: by Backdoor’s count, 2,000+ hiring contacts at 320+ companies, mostly startups in India. That sheet lists founders and HR leads, not AI companies, so filter it yourself. You pay only when Backdoor sends: in India, seven days of outreach is ₹999, paid once, with no renewal.

If you want AI startup founders to hear from you before the role is posted, see how Backdoor works.

Prefer posted YC roles? Filter for “Remote (IN)”

If you would rather apply to roles that are already posted, YC Work at a Startup shows the founder on each listing and covers YC companies only. Its India page carried 25 listings on 14 October, and few were AI engineering roles, so expect to use the remote page as well.

Sweeping posted AI roles by remote scope on Wellfound

For a wider sweep of posted startup roles with clear remote labels, Wellfound is the board to browse. You still apply to each role yourself and wait for a reply.

For the email itself, cold email templates for a startup founder has three you can adapt.

A note to a voice AI CTO in Bengaluru, and the follow-up

Illustrative example written for this page: a founder note for an applied AI role at a seed-stage voice AI startup. It is not a real message or a real user's result.

The trigger. A Bengaluru voice AI startup announces its seed round and says it will grow its engineering team. There is no AI engineer listing yet. The CTO is Farhan.

The note.

Subject: Agent evals for your Hindi voice bots

Hi Farhan,

Congrats on the round. I tried your demo line in Hindi, and the bot recovered well when I switched to English mid-sentence.

I build LLM agents for a lending company’s collections calls. Last quarter I wrote the eval set we now run before every prompt change, about 400 real call transcripts, and it caught two regressions before they shipped.

If you are hiring for agent work, would 15 minutes next week suit you?

Ishita

Four days on, in the same thread.

Hi Farhan, a small observation: I noticed your bots read numbers out digit by digit. We fixed the same issue with a formatting step before speech, and I can share how it worked if useful.

Ishita

Farhan can see that Ishita actually rang his demo line, her eval set comes with a number, and the ask is one short call. The follow-up hands him a fix for a problem in his product rather than asking again. To fit it to your case, swap in the one piece of AI work you can describe in a sentence, with a number, and something specific you noticed in their product.

Pick your AI engineering lane, then make three moves

Decide which of the three groups above you belong to: agents, infrastructure or product. Then:

  • Bookmark the job boards of five companies from the table that match it, and the YC India and remote pages.
  • Put one public piece of work in order: a repo, an eval write-up or a short demo that someone outside your job can open.
  • Choose five small AI startups that raised or launched in the past month and send each founder a note, written yourself or drafted by Backdoor and approved by you.

Recheck the boards next week. Some of these roles will be gone, and others will be up.

How we chose

We compare tools on what their own public pages say, checked on the dates shown, and label every claim. How we compare tools.

FAQ

Ai engineer jobs remote india

On 14 October 2026, Atlan listed a remote Principal Software Engineer role for its agent platform in India, Supabase listed an AI Platform Engineer role as "Remote, Global", and Canonical listed an AI/ML engineering role as "Home based - Worldwide". GitLab, which calls itself remote-first, listed a Staff Software Engineer in NLP for Bangalore. In our sample of 16, remote roles open to India were fewer than on-site ones and more senior, so check each listing's location line and working hours before you apply.

Best companies hiring ai engineers in india

There is no single list that stays right for long, but on 14 October 2026 Sarvam AI, Composio, TrueFoundry, Bolna AI and Observe.AI had live AI engineer roles in India, alongside larger companies such as HackerRank, Turing, Meesho, Mindtickle, Glance and Coursera. The table on this page gives each role, its location and the experience asked, with a link to the listing. Openings change weekly, so treat it as a starting point and recheck before you apply.

  • Startups hiring in Bangalore, and how to check who is hiring now

    Startups with Bengaluru roles posted in the past week, checked on 14 October 2026, include Fibr AI, Simplismart, Recruiterflow, Decentro, cardboard.ai, Nosh Robotics, FreightFox and Botsync.

  • Finding startups before they post roles

    To find startups that are hiring before the job post goes up, watch funding, launch and hiring news, which Backdoor says it searches every morning across Y Combinator, Product Hunt, TechCrunch, Crunchbase and careers pages before drafting the founder note; its daily matches are free.

  • AI job agents for seed-stage and engineering roles

    For an engineer aiming at seed-stage startups, Backdoor is where to start: it picks matched startups from your background each morning and drafts a founder email for your approval, which suits companies whose founder hires the first engineers directly, often before a role is posted.

  • Startup job sites for remote and early-stage roles

    For remote roles at early-stage startups, start with Backdoor for the roles that are not posted yet, then Wellfound's remote section and YC Work at a Startup for the ones that are.

  • Cold email to a startup founder for a job: 3 templates

    A cold email to a startup founder for a job should be short, well under 100 words: one recent detail about their company, one result of yours that fits it, and one small ask, sent from your own inbox under a specific subject line.

Sources checked

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