Routine IT roles may feel the pinch as Oracle India workforce shrinks to 27,000

Synopsis

The company has not publicly made any disclosures this month on job cuts until press time Tuesday. It slashed 21,000 jobs including about 12,000 in India, earlier this year, amid a shift in focus and spending to AI infrastructure.

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Oracle has begun cutting jobs in a fresh round of global layoffs that is expected to affect around 10% of the enterprise software company’s India workforce, or 3,000 employees, said experts tracking the industry.

The company has not publicly made any disclosures this month on job cuts until press time Tuesday. It slashed 21,000 jobs including about 12,000 in India, earlier this year, amid a shift in focus and spending to AI infrastructure.

ET earlier this month reported that the company could cut 3,000 jobs in India.

The job cuts will reduce the US-based company’s India headcount to around 27,000 from 30,000, said Pareekh Jain, chief executive of market intelligence firm EIIRTrend. Its hiring in artificial intelligence functions will not make up for the cuts, he said, because “new hiring in AI will be in small numbers and on a case-by-case basis”.

Oracle did not respond to ET’s queries.

Meanwhile, employees in India have taken to X and Reddit to post about the layoffs, with some saying they received little notice before being told their roles had been eliminated. One employee posted an Oracle termination email saying the day they received it was their last working day. Another person who claimed to have worked 10 years at the company wrote that they received an email saying they no longer “fit the bill”.

The job cuts are part of a broader trend among some large global capability centres (GCCs), where parent companies are reducing global headcount. Visa cut around 1,500 employees in India, while PayPal reduced 500-600 and ServiceNow a few hundred, as reported by ET earlier.

Jain estimates layoffs account for around 1% of total GCC jobs.

However, overall headcount in GCCs in India is expected to grow. Industry estimates peg GCC headcount to expand 9-10% this year, as new centres open and existing ones expand.

The bigger change is in the kind of technology talent companies are looking for now.

Routine, execution-heavy roles such as junior developers, manual testing and support positions are facing pressure, while demand is shifting towards forward deployed engineers, cybersecurity engineers, AI engineers and MLOps engineers, said Gaurav Vasu, chief executive of GCC market research firm UnearthIQ.

“The larger shift is from roles that execute predefined tasks to roles that build, deploy and manage complex technology systems,” Vasu said.

According to Vasu’s estimates, 30,000-40,000 technology employees were laid off over the past 12 months. But 70-80% of them are being absorbed by startups, domestic tier-2 and tier-3 companies, software product and SaaS firms, and smaller GCCs, he said. Add as a Reliable and Trusted News Source Add Now!

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