Where are India's AI jobs? 1,289 AI job ads, city by city

We read 1,957 live IT job ads on hirist.tech, India's IT job board, on 18 October 2026, and 1,289 of them were AI roles. Bengaluru was named in 578 of those AI ads, 45% of the total. Hyderabad came next with 247 (19%), then Delhi NCR with 234 (18%), Pune 181 (14%), Chennai 133 (10%) and Mumbai 100 (8%). Another 144 (11%) said remote or anywhere in India. Wherever the job was, the ads asked for the same things: five years' experience, Python, LLMs, and increasingly agents and retrieval.

This is our own count, not a quoted survey. It is the Indian half of our South Asia job-board count, broken down by city, and the counts file is published with the article.

How did we count, and what is an AI job here?

hirist.tech is an IT-only board whose robots.txt allows automated reading. Naukri, the largest Indian board, blocks AI agents by name, so we left it out. We ran twelve AI searches (machine learning, generative AI, LLM, data scientist, MLOps, AI engineer and others) and ten software searches, and read every result, one request a second.

An AI role means the title names AI, machine learning, LLM, NLP, computer vision, generative AI, MLOps or data science work. A sales, recruiting or content job with "AI" in the title does not count. The city is the one the ad names. An ad that lists several cities counts once in each, so the city shares add up to more than 100%. 117 of the 1,957 ads named no city we could place.

Which Indian cities have the most AI jobs?

The last column is high everywhere because most of our searches were AI searches; it says which cities' results were mostly AI, not how much of a city's whole job market is AI. The ranking is the useful part, and it matches other counts: CBRE's analysis of 64,500 AI-tagged Naukri listings also put Bengaluru first, at 25.4%, with Delhi NCR (24.8%) and Mumbai (19.2%) behind it. Their shares are lower and flatter because they count every AI-tagged listing, not AI titles on one IT board.

Do the cities ask for different skills?

Less than you might expect. Python is in 81% to 90% of AI ads in every city, and LLMs in 67% to 75%. The differences are at the edges.

Hyderabad's ads lean hardest on the newer LLM stack: agents in 63% and retrieval (RAG) in 62%, the highest of any city, with both big clouds in more than half. Pune and Chennai ask most often for Python. Pune and Mumbai ask least often for evals, and Mumbai least often for AWS. Azure is ahead of AWS in five of the six cities, all but Delhi NCR.

How much experience do they want, and what do they pay?

Five years is the median minimum in every city. The cities differ in pay, but few ads show it, so treat these as rough:

Ads that show pay skew senior, so these are going rates for experienced AI engineers, not starting salaries. For ordinary base pay by role in each city, each city page has Payscale's medians, with the number of salary profiles behind each figure.

Who is hiring?

Services and analytics firms post the most AI ads in every city: Capgemini appears in the top six in all six cities, and Axtria in four. Tredence leads Bengaluru, Antino and Axtria lead Delhi NCR, and KANINI is near the top in Pune and Chennai. Many product companies and global capability centres hire through LinkedIn or their own career pages instead, which this count does not see.

What should a learner in India take from this?

1. You do not have to move to Bengaluru to learn, but the jobs cluster there. Nearly half the AI ads named it, and one in nine was remote. The skills asked for are the same everywhere, so where you learn matters less than what you can show.
2. The stack is settled: Python, LLMs, RAG, agents and evals, on Azure or AWS. Hyderabad's ads show where it is heading, with agents and retrieval in nearly two out of three.
3. Five years is the bar on paper, and shipped work is how people get under it. Production experience was asked for in 72% of India's AI ads in our first count. A deployed project an employer can open is the closest substitute.

What are the limits of this count?

• One board, searched, not counted in full. hirist.tech is IT-only and we read what our searches returned, so these are shares of a sample, not of India's whole market. Naukri, LinkedIn and company career pages were not read.
• Multi-city ads count in each city. That is why the shares add to more than 100%.
• Small pay samples. Between 9 and 31 ads per city showed pay.
• Titles decide the groups. A "Software Engineer" building an AI product counts as other tech.
• One snapshot. These are the ads live on 18 October 2026. We plan to repeat the count each quarter into a new dated file.