Southwest Airlines to expand India global centre to 1,000 employees, executive says

BENGALURU/HYDERABAD: Southwest Airlines plans to scale hiring at its newly launched global capability centre in India to about 1,000 staff over the next few years as it sets up its first such hub outside headquarters to build tech capabilities, a senior executive told Reuters.

The U.S. airline, which opened its Global Innovation Center in India’s Hyderabad city on Wednesday, has already hired more than a dozen employees and intends to scale up to 200 employees in the near term, Krishna Kallepalli, Vice President and Global Head of Innovation (India) at Southwest Airlines, said in an interview.

The new office was not intended to operate as a traditional back-office hub, he said.

“We don’t want to just do a lift and shift and create another back office,” he said. “We are looking at business capabilities that are technology-infused.”

The move comes at a time when the U.S. government has been trying to encourage domestic hiring, while companies continue to tap India’s engineering and AI talent pools.

The country’s GCCs have evolved from low-cost outsourcing hubs to local offices of global companies supporting their parent organisations in multiple functions, including daily operations, finance, research and development.

“We’re starting off (with hiring) on the core engineering side … platform engineering, cloud engineering, network engineering,” Kallepalli said, adding that the next area of roles includes data science and machine learning skills.

Southwest has leased about 20,000 square feet in Hyderabad and can immediately accommodate around 200 employees.

He did not provide a precise timeline for the planned expansion to 1,000 employees, but said the company wanted to focus on expanding at “the right pragmatic scale”.

The executive also added that AI was currently driving hiring demand in India’s GCC sector rather than replacing jobs.