American multinational semiconductor company
Advanced Micro Devices is planning to expand its team in India nearly 40% by
hiring 500 engineers to strengthen its focus on new technologies including augmented
reality and virtual reality (AR and VR). In addition to this, the company is
also looking to reskill its employees in AR and VR. “We are looking at AR and
VR for now. We will hire fresh talent, but also we are heavily investing in
upskilling and reskilling our existing employees to contribute to the changing
demands,” said Kiranmai Pendyala, chief operating officer-HR, AMD
This is similar to its strategy a few years ago when it started working on game console
technologies and shifted a part of its workforce to the new unit. “We had set
up the Radeon Technologies group to exclusively work in the graphics space, and
identified machine learning and virtual reality as new growth sectors for us,”
Pendyala said.
Initially, AMD did not have these skillsets
among its employees in Hyderabad and had to bring in some talent from the US.
“We did job rotations, short-term assignments in different countries and
practised reverse mentoring,” Pendyala said.
AMD is also sourcing talent and know-how in technologies from institutes in the
US such as MIT and the University of
Texas, Austin, apart from Indian institutes such as IITs and IIIT Hyderabad. In
India, the Sunnyvale, California headquartered company has 18% women among its
1,300 employees, higher than its global average of 15%. More than 50% of its
workforce is outside of the Americas. Only 300 of its employees in India are in
the software segment.“We largely have hardware engineers, that is, people who
work with silicon,” Pendyala said.
