Intel India seeks disruptive innovation from top minds

Recognising the need to mentor, lead and groom its technical talent, which plays a key role in charting out future technology areas for Intel and the industry, Intel India is on a mission to make sure that its employees reach top leadership positions within the company.

As the largest non-manufacturing site outside of the US, Intel India, which began its R&D activities in 1999, employs 4,500 people today, of which 94 per cent are in engineering and technical streams.

Intel hosted its first ever Career Fair designed exclusively for technologists last week where technologists interacted with US-based Intel Fellow Keshavan Tiruvallur and heard the inspiring story of his meteoric rise from a board designer to principal engineer in 15 years and his progress thereafter to senior principal engineer and Fellow, a top position at Intel on the technical ladder.

“When we hire engineers for the R&D and Technical streams, they join as individual contributors. However, wider contribution and impact in an engineering role comes from a principal engineer (PE).

Although every engineer cannot rise to become a principal engineer, the idea is to groom technical talent by allowing them to mingle with a Fellow who can mentor and guide them on how they can also grow to become a PE.

“Grooming includes addressing their concerns and other challenges that they face,” Tiruvallur told BusinessLine . Intel India engineers were also addressed by senior business leaders and technologists to provide both management and technical views to a career in tech.

Currently, Intel India has 18 PEs and four senior PEs, which Tiruvallur feels is grossly inadequate. “At least five to six per cent of our engineering headcount has to consist of PEs, which means we need 211-254 PEs to be able to come up with disruptive innovations out of India. We are also assessing the preparedness of our engineers to move up the ladder to become PEs,” he said.

Concurring with Keshavan, Rudramuni B, Executive Director & Head of R&D, Dell India, said, “In order to have complete end-to-end product ownership, at least 8-10 per cent of our engineering talent needs to be PEs who are product architects.” Dell India R&D employs 2,500 engineers and currently has 35 PEs and distinguished engineers.