When we were deciding where to build the company, the obvious answer was Bengaluru. That's where the engineers are. That's where the VC money is. That's where every funded Indian startup ends up, by default, because everyone else is already there.
We chose Rajkot. Two years in, it's one of the decisions we're most grateful for.
The talent argument
The talent argument for Bengaluru is real, but it's also overused. Yes, Bengaluru has more engineers per square kilometre than anywhere else in India. It also has more competition for those engineers than anywhere else in India. When you're competing against Google, Flipkart, and Zepto for the same pool of candidates, you either pay rates that kill your runway or you hire people who couldn't get offers from the companies you're competing with.
Rajkot has graduates from BITS Pilani Goa, NIT Surat, SVNIT, and a dozen strong private engineering colleges in Gujarat that Bengaluru's talent pipeline ignores. These are people who are technically excellent, haven't been caught up in the funding-and-options hype cycle, and — critically — want to build something real in the city where they grew up.
Our average salary is 40% lower than a comparable Bengaluru hire. Our average tenure is 3.2 years against an industry average of 1.1 years. The maths on retention alone makes the location decision obvious.
What we look for
We don't hire for resume. We hire for reasoning. Our interview process is a single four-hour session: two hours of pair programming on a real problem from our codebase, one hour of system design discussion, one hour of talking about how they think.
We're specifically not looking for people who know all the answers. We're looking for people who know how to find answers they don't have yet. In a company our size, every engineer owns a whole system. You can't afford someone who freezes without a playbook.
The one non-negotiable: intellectual honesty. The ability to say "I don't know" or "I was wrong" is more valuable to us than any particular skill. Engineers who can't update their beliefs when they're wrong ship bad decisions into production for months before anyone admits it.
We don't hire for where you went to college. We hire for how you think when you're stuck.
How we keep people
The three things that keep engineers are: interesting problems, people they respect, and feeling like their work matters. We can't compete with Bengaluru on salary. We can compete — and do — on all three of those.
Every engineer at AIVA works on a problem that affects a real human conversation happening right now. When Karan shipped a latency improvement, he could watch call latency drop in the analytics dashboard. That feedback loop — your code, running, making something better for a real customer — is something most engineers at large companies never experience.
We also genuinely invest in the team staying in Rajkot long-term. Company-paid housing assistance, a substantial learning budget that runs no questions asked, and a four-day week during the monsoon months because Rajkot is beautiful in July and August and you should be outside. These aren't big-budget perks. They're signals that we intend to be here for a long time and we want the team to be here with us.