LTM Says Entry-Level Engineering Roles Have Collapsed as AI Reshapes IT Services

Mid-tier Indian IT services company LTM said it is seeing a near total collapse of entry-level engineering roles as artificial intelligence reshapes how software is built and delivered, the company's chief delivery officer told Business Standard on Sunday. The basic functions once handled by junior staff, classified internally as L0 to L2, are disappearing as machines write code and AI compresses the software development life cycle, Gururaj Deshpande said in an interaction.

Deshpande said the shift is now built into how LTM prices and staffs its work. On any new deal the company bids for, it no longer assigns an L0 role, he said. LTM began by asking what would happen if the layers from L0 to L2 were collapsed and AI-native thinking was applied to the delivery model itself, he added. Carrying that out meant discarding its existing tooling and rebuilding its operating model around new kinds of work.

New Roles Replace Old Ones

The roles emerging in place of junior engineering posts include AI support engineers, AI architects and tokenomic specialists, according to the company. Traditional testing, maintenance and quality assurance positions are shrinking as automation absorbs routine tasks. Human engineers are increasingly expected to supervise and verify what machines produce rather than perform those tasks themselves.

Deshpande described the AI support engineer as a human in the loop, less a doer and more a checker. Building the tooling first, then identifying the skills required, formed part of the company's revised operating model. With AI written into both new contracts and renewals, LTM is looking for engineers with different skills than in the past and is hiring more heavily at the bottom of the pyramid so it can bring in AI-native engineers at lower cost.

The company expects to hire at least 600 people in this effort. The demand for AI-native engineers reflects a wider reordering of technology work in India, where services firms are repricing projects around outcomes and automation rather than headcount tiers. For working engineers, the change means that the tasks that once served as training for larger responsibilities are the first to be handed to software.

A Wider Squeeze on the First Job

Separate analysis points in the same direction. An EY estimate from 2025 found that entry-level IT roles in India had declined by 20 to 25 percent as companies automated work and hired more narrowly. A PwC 2026 AI Jobs Barometer that examined more than one billion job advertisements found that junior roles most exposed to AI are seven times more likely to ask for skills once associated with senior staff. Early-career postings in highly exposed sectors have flatlined, while entry-level roles demanding experienced-level skills have grown 35 percent since 2019, according to that study.

Engineering educators and employers in India are now debating how beginners acquire experience that companies increasingly expect them to arrive with. Routine entry-level tasks were long the setting where young engineers learned how a system behaves, where it fails and what a careless decision costs. With those tasks automated, hiring managers are placing more weight on whether candidates can read generated code critically, explain and test it, and defend the decisions behind it.

What to Watch Next

The next indicators will be hiring numbers at Indian IT services firms, the mix of junior and senior postings, and whether companies keep funding training pipelines once routine work is automated. LTM's own hiring target and the structure of its deal teams will show how quickly the new roles take hold. For students and early-career professionals, the demand for AI-native engineers signals that verification, oversight and systems judgment are becoming the entry ticket rather than the reward for years of service.