Jaguar Land Rover hires hundreds of engineers who are being hired from tech companies. These engineers will be working on EV development in the company. JLR is owned by India’s Tata Motors, they made the announcement to hire through its jobs portal. Around 800 roles are to be filled by these fired employees.
The jobs are for roles spanning electrification, data science, machine learning, and self-driving. The luxury carmaker, which wants to become an “electric-first” business from 2025, said it believed workers leaving big tech groups like Amazon were most likely to have the required skills to fill new roles in Britain, Ireland, the United States, India, China, and Hungary.
The majority of the jobs will be in Britain and split between JLR’s offices in Manchester and Gaydon in central England, Chief Information Officer Anthony Battle said. “We’ve had vacancies there for quite a long time. Some of the capabilities are quite difficult to fill because it’s a very competitive market, particularly software engineers and architects,” Battle said in an online video interview. “It’s fortuitous for us, and definitely others, that there is now this huge availability of talent at a time when we’d already planned to move forward.”
Hiring drive
The hiring drive comes after thousands of layoffs in recent weeks at U.S. tech firms including Twitter, Meta, and Amazon, some of which have offices in London and Dublin. Tech companies are trimming staff and slowing hiring as they face higher interest rates and sluggish consumer spending, as well as a strong dollar. Facebook parent Meta is cutting about 11,000 jobs, the first big round of lay-offs in the social-media company’s history, while Twitter under new owner Elon Musk has imposed deep cuts and seen many of its workers quit.
The new jobs, particularly in artificial intelligence and machine learning, will support the company’s data collection efforts through which it gains insights on car performance and customer behavior, Battle said. JLR last year announced an electrification strategy under which all Jaguar cars would be fully electric by 2024 and an electric option would be offered across its entire portfolio including Land Rover. Jaguars’ move came as Twitter continued to bleed engineers and other workers on Thursday after Mr. Musk gave them a choice to pledge to “hardcore” work or resign with severance pay.
A number of employees took to a private forum outside of the company’s messaging board to discuss their planned departure, asking questions about how it might jeopardize their US visas or if they would get the promised severance pay, according to an employee fired earlier this week who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
