Orchestration layer is new battleground for Indian AI talent

Barely a year after prompt engineering emerged as one of artificial intelligence’s hottest skills, India’s technology industry is already looking beyond it.

Recruiters told ET that hiring for standalone prompt engineering roles has plateaued as companies increasingly seek engineers who can build and orchestrate agentic or autonomous AI systems, signalling one of the fastest shifts yet in the country’s AI talent market.

The change is showing up across hiring mandates as enterprises look for engineers who can build production-grade AI systems rather than simply interact with large language models.


“Hiring requirements asking for AI agents, agentic AI, autonomous workflows and AI orchestration have grown by almost 180% to 220% over the last 12 months,” said Neeti Sharma, chief executive of staffing firm TeamLease Digital. “While these roles still account for about 5% to 8% of overall hiring volumes, they are among the fastest-growing categories.”

Sharma said the market has already begun moving beyond prompt engineering.

“Prompt engineering is becoming a foundational skill rather than a standalone role,” she said. “Today, employers are looking for engineers who can build production-grade AI systems with skills such as multi-agent systems, AI orchestration frameworks, AI evaluation, observability and autonomous workflow design.”

According to Kapil Joshi, chief executive of Quess Corp-IT staffing, agentic AI developer roles have grown 260% year on year, while AI software engineer roles focused on agentic systems and Model Context Protocol (MCP) have increased 225%. Hiring for GenAI and Agentic AI Engineer roles has risen 205%.

“The data already makes the case,” Joshi said. “This category is already among the fastest-growing in India’s technology workforce.”

Employers are no longer differentiating candidates based on their ability to write prompts, he added.

“Twelve months ago, GenAI familiarity and prompt engineering were the primary asks. Today those are treated as baseline competencies,” Joshi added. “What employers are actively competing for now are skills that sit at the deployment and orchestration layer, including MCP, multi-agent orchestration frameworks, retrieval-augmented generation, LLMOps and MLOps.”

According to Quess data, 49.1% of active AI hiring demand is concentrated in professionals with three to five years of experience, suggesting companies are looking for engineers who can immediately build and deploy AI systems.

Specialist staffing firm Xpheno is also seeing a similar shift.

“The industry has moved well beyond prompt engineering and moved into higher-orbit skillsets and roles within the AI and agentic automation spectrum,” said cofounder Kamal Karanth.

According to him, the talent pool for engineers working on AI agents, agentic AI and autonomous AI systems has expanded 31% over the past year to around 26,000 professionals, while active hiring demand has grown 40%. The segment is also seeing annual talent churn of more than 34%, reflecting strong competition for experienced professionals.

Active demand for prompt engineering roles has “largely remained stagnant and is low over the last two quarters”, Karanth said, adding that AI tools are increasingly capable of generating prompts on their own through meta prompting.

The fastest-growing skills in Xpheno’s hiring pipeline include Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), data pipelines, genetic algorithms and Apache Kafka, reflecting increasing demand for engineers who can build, integrate and operationalise AI systems.

Joshi said the shift is likely to accelerate over the next few years as companies embed AI deeper into their businesses.

“By 2027, we project 2.3 million new AI-embedded roles in India and the transformation of more than 4.5 million existing ones,” he said.