Getting a remote GenAI role from a tier-2 city in India

At the VSICS podium, Kanpur
At the VSICS podium, Kanpur

Originally published at https://pranjulrathour.scult.in/blog/how-to-get-hired-remote-ai-india. That copy is the canonical version and gets updates first.

Kanpur is not where AI companies come to hire on campus. That has never stopped anyone here from working for them. Remote GenAI roles judge repositories, writing and reliability, and all three can be built from any city with an internet connection. Here is the playbook I give students who want to stay where they are and still work on serious systems.

Where remote roles actually appear

  • Startup job boards and the careers pages of small AI companies, which hire remotely by default.
  • Founders' posts on LinkedIn and X — many roles are filled before they become listings.
  • Open-source communities around the tools you use; maintainers and contributors hire each other.
  • Referrals from practitioners you met at hackathons and sessions. This is why showing up matters.

What remote employers screen for

  1. A project they can run in five minutes from a URL.
  2. Written communication — a README, a blog post, a clear message — because remote work is mostly writing.
  3. Evidence of finishing things without supervision: shipped side projects, hackathon results, a community you ran.
  4. Comfort with asynchronous work: documenting decisions, updating without being asked.

Skills that travel

Retrieval, evaluation, deployment and debugging production LLM apps — the roadmap skills. Plus the meta-skill remote teams value most: writing a good update. "Shipped the reranker; recall@5 up from 0.78 to 0.91; blocked on API quota, requested increase" is a message that gets you kept.

The application

  • A short message: who you are, one link, one sentence on why this company, one question.
  • The resume as a single page with projects first.
  • A time-zone note and your availability, stated plainly.

Meanwhile

Freelance AI work and local clients keep you building while you apply; SCULT INDIA grew from exactly that. And your city has a community — Kanpur has MeetKats and TechVerse Enclave — where the next referral is sitting across the table. See building a tech career from Kanpur.

Trophy and certificate of merit at Vividhotsava 2025
Trophy and certificate of merit at Vividhotsava 2025
Walking a room through evaluation criteria
Walking a room through evaluation criteria
From my carousels
15 Free Tools, No Signup, Every Link
15 Free Tools, No Signup, Every Link, slide 115 Free Tools, No Signup, Every Link, slide 2
15 Free Tools, No Signup, Every Link, slide 315 Free Tools, No Signup, Every Link, slide 4
Pranjul Rathour
Pranjul Rathour
GenAI engineer, Kanpur · 3x first-prize hackathon winner · campus mentor
I ship production RAG pipelines, fine-tune LLMs and build agentic AI products end to end. I lead engineering at SCULT INDIA for a 14-member team and have mentored 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave.
Open to: GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at colleges.
On stage, at hackathons and on campus
A career session for students
A career session for students
Requirements gathering and user flows, on stage
Requirements gathering and user flows, on stage
Pranjul Rathour, GenAI engineer, Kanpur
Pranjul Rathour, GenAI engineer, Kanpur

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