India produces over 1.5 million engineering graduates every year. Yet every CTO we speak with tells the same story: finding experienced engineers in DevOps, cybersecurity, AI/ML, cloud architecture, and data engineering remains brutally difficult. The paradox of a massive talent supply coexisting with acute skill shortages defines India's IT hiring landscape in 2025 and beyond. Here is what the data shows and what you can do about it.
The Numbers Behind the Shortage
According to NASSCOM's 2025 Talent Demand-Supply report, India faces a shortage of approximately 200,000 skilled IT professionals in high-demand domains. The gap is not in headcount — it is in capability. While entry-level programming talent is abundant, experienced professionals with production-grade skills in emerging technologies are scarce.
The demand-supply mismatch by domain:
- AI/ML Engineers: Demand up 45% year-over-year, supply growing at only 15%
- Cybersecurity Professionals: 30,000+ unfilled positions across India
- Cloud Architects (AWS/Azure/GCP): 3:1 demand-to-supply ratio for certified architects
- DevOps/SRE Engineers: Average time-to-fill is 65-90 days, twice the industry average
- Data Engineers: Fastest-growing demand segment, with 50%+ YoY growth in job postings
Skill 1: DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering
DevOps is no longer a niche practice — it is the baseline expectation for modern software delivery. Yet the supply of engineers who can design and operate production-grade CI/CD pipelines, container orchestration platforms, and observability stacks remains thin.
Why the shortage exists: DevOps is fundamentally a cross-disciplinary skill. It requires understanding of software development, infrastructure, networking, security, and operations. Most engineering curricula do not cover this breadth. The best DevOps engineers are self-taught practitioners who learned by running production systems — and that experience takes years to accumulate.
What companies are paying: Senior DevOps engineers (5-8 years) command 25-40 LPA in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune. Staff-level SRE engineers at top-tier companies earn 45-65 LPA. These numbers have risen 20-30% over the past two years alone.
How to find them: Look for contributors to infrastructure open-source projects, speakers at DevOpsDays and KubeCon, and engineers with certifications like CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) or HashiCorp Certified Terraform Associate. Our niche recruitment practice maintains a dedicated DevOps talent pipeline with over 500 pre-vetted professionals.
Skill 2: Cybersecurity
The cybersecurity talent gap is a global crisis, and India is no exception. With the Digital Personal Data Protection Act creating new compliance requirements and cyberattacks becoming more sophisticated, every enterprise needs security professionals — and there are not enough to go around.
Why the shortage exists: Cybersecurity requires a unique combination of deep technical skill, adversarial thinking, and continuous learning. The threat landscape changes weekly. Unlike software development, where a strong engineer can become productive in a new language within months, security expertise is built through years of hands-on incident response, penetration testing, and architecture review.
The most scarce subspecialties: - Cloud security architects (securing AWS/Azure/GCP environments) - Application security engineers (SAST, DAST, threat modelling) - Incident response and digital forensics specialists - Identity and access management (IAM) engineers - Security operations centre (SOC) analysts with threat hunting capability
What companies are paying: Security architects command 30-50 LPA. CISOs at mid-size companies earn 60-100 LPA. Even junior security analysts with 2-3 years of relevant experience command 12-18 LPA — far above their software engineering peers at the same experience level.
Skill 3: AI/ML Engineering
Everyone wants to build with AI. Few have the talent to do it properly. The gap between a data scientist who can train a model in a Jupyter notebook and an ML engineer who can deploy, scale, and maintain that model in production is vast — and it is the production-ready engineers who are hardest to find.
Why the shortage exists: AI/ML engineering is a discipline that barely existed as a defined role five years ago. The academic pipeline is growing quickly, but production experience cannot be accelerated. Companies need engineers who understand not just model architectures but MLOps pipelines, feature stores, model monitoring, A/B testing frameworks, and the business context to know when ML is the right solution.
What companies need most: - MLOps engineers who can build and maintain model serving infrastructure - NLP engineers with experience in large language model fine-tuning and deployment - Computer vision engineers for manufacturing, agriculture, and retail applications - Data engineers who can build the data pipelines that feed ML systems
Skill 4: Cloud Architecture
The shift to cloud-native architecture has created enormous demand for engineers who can design, build, and operate systems on AWS, Azure, and GCP. But there is a critical distinction: cloud users are abundant; cloud architects are rare.
Why the shortage exists: Using cloud services is straightforward. Architecting a multi-region, highly available, cost-optimised cloud infrastructure requires deep understanding of networking, security, distributed systems, and cost management. These skills are typically developed over 5-10 years of hands-on experience.
The most valued certifications: - AWS Solutions Architect Professional - Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect - Azure Solutions Architect Expert - Kubernetes certifications (CKA, CKAD, CKS)
How companies are bridging the gap: Progressive organisations are investing in internal cloud training programmes, partnering with cloud providers for architect-in-residence programmes, and using staff augmentation to bring in experienced cloud architects who upskill the existing team while delivering on current projects.
Skill 5: Data Engineering
Data engineering has quietly become one of the most critical and hardest-to-fill roles in Indian IT. As companies move from basic analytics to real-time data platforms, the demand for engineers who can build reliable, scalable data infrastructure has exploded.
Why the shortage exists: Data engineering sits at the intersection of software engineering, distributed systems, and domain knowledge. It requires proficiency in technologies like Apache Spark, Kafka, Airflow, dbt, and modern data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks) — a stack that changes rapidly and requires continuous learning.
The demand drivers: - Every company wants a "data platform" but few have the in-house expertise to build one - Regulatory requirements (RBI, SEBI, DPDP Act) demand robust data governance - Real-time analytics and personalisation require streaming data infrastructure - AI/ML initiatives are bottlenecked by poor data quality and unavailable data pipelines
Strategies for Bridging the Talent Gap
The shortage is real, but it is not insurmountable. Here are strategies that work:
1. Build internal talent pipelines Identify high-potential engineers in adjacent roles and invest in their upskilling. A strong backend engineer can become a competent DevOps practitioner in 6-9 months with structured mentorship and real project exposure.
2. Look beyond the metros Tier-2 cities like Jaipur, Indore, Kochi, Coimbatore, and Bhubaneswar have growing tech ecosystems with lower competition for talent. Remote-first policies make geographic arbitrage a viable strategy.
3. Hire for aptitude, train for skill For roles where production experience is scarce, hire engineers with strong fundamentals and a demonstrated learning trajectory. Pair them with senior mentors and give them real responsibilities early.
4. Use contract specialists strategically Bring in experienced contract professionals for 6-12 month engagements to build the initial infrastructure and establish best practices, while your permanent team ramps up alongside them.
5. Partner with specialised staffing firms Generalist recruiters struggle with niche technology roles because they lack the technical depth to evaluate candidates. Specialised firms like StakTeck maintain deep networks in high-demand domains and can access passive candidates that job boards cannot reach.
The Outlook
India's IT talent shortage is structural, not cyclical. The demand for advanced technology skills will continue to outpace supply for the foreseeable future. Companies that build proactive talent strategies — investing in internal development, leveraging flexible staffing models, and partnering with specialised recruiters — will win the talent war. Those that rely solely on job board postings and hope for the best will continue to struggle.
The talent is out there. Finding it requires strategy, speed, and the right partnerships.
