Jaguar Land Rover to hire for 800 roles in self-driving, electric vehicles

Tata Motors-owned Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is turning to laid off tech workers to fill in its 800 job roles to help develop electric cars. The company has launched a jobs portal for displaced tech workers to fill 800 roles spanning self-driving, electrification, machine learning and data science. These roles are meant for different regions including Britain, Ireland, the US, India, China and Hungary.

Majority of the jobs roles will be in Britain and split between JLR's offices in Manchester and Gaydon in central England, the company's Chief Information Officer Anthony Battle, said in an online interview. The luxury carmaker, which wants to become an "electric-first" business from 2025, believes that workers leaving big tech groups like Amazon were most likely to have the required skills to fill new roles.

Battle added that JLR has 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," he said.

He is now trying to make the most of the pool of talent available. “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," he said.

The hiring drive comes after thousands of layoffs in recent weeks at US tech firms including Twitter, Meta and Amazon, some of which have offices in London and Dublin. The new roles at Jaguar Land Rover, 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 behaviour, 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.