Bharti Airtel is planning to set up a new technology centre in Pune to support digital services in the Western region and will be hiring around 500 digital engineering professionals by the end of the current fiscal, a senior company official said. This will be Airtel's fourth digital technology hub in India and first in the Western region to support its strategy to pivot to a digital services company, especially as 5G services are on the horizon.

Confirming the plans, Bharti Airtel chief information officer Pradipt Kapoor told PTI that Airtel is rapidly scaling up its in-house digital talent pool to support its transformation into a digital telco. "Pune being an established IT and tech hub, makes it an obvious choice for Airtel to tap into the talent pool and also drive cross-industry collaboration," Kapoor said.

Airtel is looking to hire across multiple experiences and domains – Big Data, Machine Learning, Dev Ops, and Tech Ops. The company already has similar digital technology hubs in Gurgaon, Bengaluru (Airtel X-Labs) and Noida. These facilities employ close to 3,000 people. “In addition to top global talent including Silicon Valley and domestic start-ups, Airtel is hiring from engineering institutes like IITs, NITS, IIITs for its digital technology hubs,” a company official said.

Airtel claims to have made investments worth more than $46 billion in the last couple of decades to create digital infrastructure over which 40 per cent of India's economic and digital activity takes place. Airtel's digital assets include the Airtel Thanks app, Wynk Music app, and Airtel Xstream content platform with over 180 million monthly active users.

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