Oracle has begun a fresh round of layoffs affecting more than 1,000 employees in India, according to reporting on the cuts, with the reductions concentrated in product engineering and consulting teams. Oracle employs roughly 30,000 people in India, and this round follows an earlier reduction of around 12,000 positions, making it one of the more significant rounds of job cuts at a major enterprise software company this year. You can read more detail in Deccan Herald's coverage of the cuts.

Why product engineering and consulting first

The teams most affected — product engineering and consulting — are also the areas where enterprise software vendors are under the most pressure to show returns on AI investment. As companies like Oracle push customers toward AI-embedded products and cloud infrastructure, roles tied to legacy product lines and manual consulting delivery are the first to be re-evaluated. This is consistent with what's happening more broadly: analysts tracking the sector have noted that tech layoffs have crossed 175,000 globally in 2026, with AI-driven restructuring cited as a recurring factor rather than pure cost-cutting.

Not the whole story on Indian IT hiring

It would be a mistake to read this as evidence that IT hiring in India has collapsed. In the same period, India's largest IT services companies collectively added a net 5,400 employees in the first quarter of FY27, reversing a net reduction the previous quarter, and firms tracking Global Capability Centre (GCC) hiring estimate that GCCs alone could add well over 100,000 net new roles this year, outpacing the layoffs at multinational tech vendors. In other words, the cuts are real, but they're concentrated in specific companies and functions rather than reflecting an across-the-board contraction.

What this means if you work in enterprise software or IT services

• Legacy product and generic consulting roles are the most exposed. If your work sits close to a product line being deprioritized, or to delivery work that AI tooling can now partially automate, treat this as a signal to build adjacent, harder-to-automate skills.
• GCCs and specialized hiring are still active. Roles requiring deep domain expertise, security, and AI/ML implementation are seeing continued demand even as headline layoff numbers rise.
• Internal mobility matters more than ever. At large multinational employers going through restructuring, an internal transfer to a growing team can be a safer move than waiting to see how a round of cuts plays out.

For job seekers in the Indian IT sector, the practical takeaway is to pay close attention to which functions within a company are growing versus shrinking, rather than reacting to a single company's headline layoff number in isolation.