The teams, technologies and a tectonic shift to digital play

Walk through the ground floor of Airtel Centre in Gurgaon, and you cannot miss the funky mood as you pass by the Wynk 'garage'. A hundred odd young bunch of employees are listening to music and watching movies. Almost all the time. No, it is not the chill-out area for employees. On the contrary, this is what they do at work. Airtel is changing. Very rapidly. From a traditional voice and internet telco to an innovative digital products company.

Walk to the next floor, which houses the Airtel Payments Bank team. And you can see a few hundred people working on India's truly first, 100% digital, paper-less payments bank. Walk up the higher floors. You will see many hundreds working on more digital products and technologies. Online, apps, self-care, payments, experience, new products and so on.

Says Aditya Kohli, Senior Vice-President, HR, "At Airtel, we are hiring almost 30 - 40 young digital talent every week. We have been doing this for the last few months, and this pace of hiring will continue right through this year. Airtel is a happening place for India's best digital talent. You have the engineering expertise ? We are looking for mobile app developers, architects, data scientists, UI/IX designers, quality testers - hundreds of them. We have a strong referral program as well". Aditya is ably supported by a team that includes Mallika Bhargava, Nihar Mathur, Pushkar Singh, Sampada Gupta, Shivam Dikshit and others.

Adds Mansi Chanana, Head - People Operations at Wynk, "On top of technical expertise, we are scouting for people with passion and deep interest in things digital. If you firmly believe that digital is the new direction for India, the new dream for the Indian consumer, and if you can play a key role in making this dream come true through music and movies, Wynk is indeed home for you".

Gautam Anand, Executive Vice-President, HR chips in, "It is not just Wynk that is into digital, there is so much happening across Airtel. We already have some of India's best product talent, and are looking to expand this community. As India's favorite mobile operator, we want to build the country's finest and smartest products team. A team that will work closely with customers, understand their needs and aspirations and deliver the best digital experience on their smartphones".

The new, dynamic CEO of Wynk, Sameer Batra, has just announced a partnership with Amazon. Under a first of its kind offer in India, new and existing Airtel Postpaid customers with an Infinity plan of Rs.499 or above will get a one year Amazon Prime membership, worth Rs.999 and includes unlimited access to Amazon Prime Video, as part of their plan benefits (at no additional cost). Customers can watch and enjoy Amazon Prime Video and have access to over 11 million Prime eligible products, early & exclusive deals, special discounts and more, while shopping on Amazon.in—all as part of the Prime membership provided with their postpaid plan. The offer for one year of Amazon Prime is activated exclusively through the Airtel TV app.  

Sameer says, “This partnership is a major milestone in Airtel’s endeavour to build a world-class content platform. With Airtel TV, we are stepping up the value proposition and offering a complete digital entertainment experience to our Postpaid and Home Broadband users. By making Prime Video available to our customers for a year at no additional cost, Airtel TV is now able to offer one of the largest and most exciting entertainment experiences. We look forward to working with Amazon to delight customers with great benefits backed by a seamless experience.” 

The technical wizard behind Airtel TV, Sudipta Banerjee, CTO - Wynk, has this to say, "For the tech team, it is not just the launch of Airtel TV that is a key milestone. We are working behind the scenes to scale products for tens of millions of customers. More channels, more albums, more millions, more seamless, terrific viewing experience that will make you come back again and again. Dreams come true for customers are dreams come true for us in technology too".

Papiya Banerjee, Global Head of Talent and the Chief Learning Officer, is working on deepening the culture of digitization and digitalization. She and her team are working on "design and implementation of an integrated functional and digital skills development approach in line with requirements for the future Airtel. Live projects, certifications, nurturing a digital culture and making the Airtel brand synonymous with digital. These are my team priorities'.

Airtel has recently hired a lot of senior engineering talent. New leaders like Akshat Verma (VP & Head of Engineering - Growth) and Sundeep Sahi (Head - Digital Intelligence) are now heading large engineering programs in the digital space. Anant Kumar has been in the digital domain for the last few years, and now heads Product Engineering for several go-to-market apps and internal systems.

In summary... an open invitation to India's best digital talent

Many of you would want to know what is the scope at Airtel for digital ? The answer is: Airtel is going end-to-end digital. No surprises since the mobile customer is going digital. Our mobile play is transforming rapidly from traditional telco service to digital products play. Airtel is looking for hundreds of talent in the digital space : UI/UX, product development, business development, app developers, coding, data science, architecture, quality testing, infrastructure, operations, cloud computing, IOT and so on.

The problems that we are solving are many, but one common thread runs right across : how to deliver the best digital experience on the smartphone to India's millions at affordable prices. This space is moving fast. So, reach out quick and join this space ship !