Samsung to hire 1000 Engineers for Research in AI, IoT, 5G in India

Samsung would enlist 1000 engineers from premium institutes in India for its three research and development facilities in India. The recruits will work on artificial intelligence, machine learning, 5G, and more new age domains.

"Samsung is extremely bullish on R&D in India. We have been here for over 22 years. The three R&D centres in India work on several cutting-edge technologies," Samsung global senior vice-president and MD, Samsung R&D Institute India Bengaluru, Dipesh Shah said.

The South Korean tech giant would hire the talent from IITs, NITs, Delhi College of Engineering, BITS Pilani, Manipal Institute of Technology and IIITs among others. Out of the 1000 engineers to be recruited, 300 will be hired from 23 IITs across the country.

"We will be hiring around 1,000 engineers from top engineering colleges this year across the three R&D centres in India, of which over 300 will be from IITs. A majority of them will be hired for domains such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, signal processing, computer vision, mobile security and biometrics among others. There is a large need for talent," he added.

Along with the traditional discipline of computer science, Samsung would hire engineering graduates from streams such as electrical engineering, mathematics and computing, applied mechanics, and statistics, among others. The company hired 800 engineers last year for its R&D facilities, out of which 300 were taken from IITs, and this year too the number of engineers hired from IITs will be kept unchanged.

Samsung operates R&D facilities in Delhi, Bengaluru, and Noida. The Delhi unit mostly works on high-end television and other electronic products and company's homegrown mobile OS Tizen. The Bengaluru centre deals with research in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the internet of things.

The Noida centre handles biometrics, mobile software development, multimedia, and data security. Samsung has a total of 32 R&D centres across the world, along with three in India at Bengaluru, Noida and Delhi.

Samsung India to hire 2,500 engineering graduates.

Samsung India will hire 2,500 graduates from the country’s top engineering institutes over the next three years in what is being billed as one of its largest recruitment drives to ramp up research and development talent.

A majority of these fresh hires will be for new-age domains such as Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data and biometrics,” Dipesh Shah, global senior vice president at Samsung, told, adding that a 1,000 engineering graduates will be absorbed this year in the company’s R&D centres in Bengaluru, Noida and Delhi.

This placement season, the South Korean mobile phone and electronics major has already mopped up talent for R&D across the National Institutes of Technology (NITs) and other premier institutes such as BITS Pilani, Manipal Institute of Technology, Delhi College of Engineering and Delhi Technological University. Now, it is hiring aggressively in final placements across the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). Its recruitment offers at the IITs alone are expected to be well upwards of 300, the company said.

For Samsung, which has always invested heavily in R&D—its global spends in 2016 on the segment was about $13 billion—this year’s hiring will be a 25% jump over the last year’s 800-odd grads. Last year, Samsung was the top recruiter at the IITs.

“Samsung is extremely bullish on R&D in India. Our R&D centres in India work on cutting-edge technology to develop innovations that are centred on Indian customers’ preferences and also contribute significantly to global products,” said Shah.

The company’s Bengaluru R&D centre is the biggest outside South Korea, where research is being done on smart devices, semiconductors, printers, modems, Internet protocols and networks. Among the core areas being worked on are artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, IoT, augmented reality and networks including 5G in Bengaluru, and biometrics, mobile software development, multimedia and data security in Noida.

Delhi works primarily on research related to high-end televisions, other consumer electronics products as well as the operating system Tizen. The three centres together employ about 8,000 workers.

Although Shah said the aggressive hiring is not driven by competition, analysts said that Samsung is definitely feeling the heat, in light of the fact that as per the latest numbers from research firm IDC, Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi has caught up with it for the top spot in the Indian smartphone market.

In the third quarter of 2017, the two smartphone makers accounted for 23.5% each of the smartphone shipments in the country. The bulk of revenues for Samsung are generated by smartphones.

“Samsung is retaliating in the only way one can: ‘I can R&D you out,’” said Sandip Das, senior advisor of Analysys Mason, a global consulting and research firm specialising in telecoms, media and digital services.

“In this business, obsolescence comes in extremely quickly and even the smallest competitor can sometimes overtake market leaders. However, if you have a strong innovation engine, you can lead the way and destroy your own products instead of waiting for someone else: keep the cannibal in the family so to speak. That’s what Samsung is doing by taking advantage of the vast pool of Indian engineering talent. In the process, it will also endear itself it to the Indian government and Indian consumer,” said Das.