Billion-dollar ride-hailing Careem comes to Bengaluru to hire 100 engineers

This comes when Indian consumer internet companies are laying off employees, reports Tech in Asia

A billion-dollar ride-hailing company wants to hire 100 engineers. Where better to hunt for tech talent than in India! A million engineers graduate from India’s engineering colleges every year. And the best tech companies of the world – Google, Microsoft, and Adobe – have Indians at their helms. That’s why Dubai’s Careem, which operates in 11 countries outside India, is coming to Bangalore on February 25.

“We are looking to hire over 100 software engineers and data scientists for Careem’s research and development centers in Dubai and Berlin,” Careem spokesperson Emma Dourado tells Tech in Asia. For this, Careem is planning to host hackathons in India.

Bangalore’s Venturesity is conducting Careem’s first hiring hackathon, named HaCareem, on February 25 and 26 at 91springboard in Koramangala. This will be a 24-hour hackathon.

Java, HTML, distributed systems, Spring, and Hibernate are the skillsets they want. All the developers who get hired will be placed in Dubai and Berlin.

Five-year-old Careem is the youngest of ride-hailing unicorns. It announced an investment of $350 million from Japan’s Rakuten and Dubai’s Abraaj Capital in December. This was part of a $500 million round – the rest of which hasn’t yet been disclosed in detail.

Careem’s hiring foray comes at a time when Indian consumer internet companies that bit off more than they could chew are laying off employees. Just today, ecommerce leader Snapdeal and fashion portal Yepme confirmed major cutbacks in operations and downsizing. So it’s an opportune time for those loking to hire tech talent.

Careem’s hiring hackathon in India is also the beginning of a trend, Venturesity co-founder and CEO Subhendu Panigrahi believes.  

It’s a good time to be a software engineer in India if Subhendu’s prediction comes true.

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here