Two fresh graduates in the same year. Both have a degree. Both are based in Pune. One joins an IT services company and starts at ₹3.6 LPA. The other joins a BFSI Global Capability Centre in Kharadi and starts at ₹9 LPA.
Same city. Same batch. Very different salaries.
The difference is not luck. It is the role, the company type, and the preparation that went into landing there. Pune’s IT market in 2026 is not a flat landscape where everyone earns roughly the same. It is genuinely tiered, and understanding which roles sit at the top of that salary table is the most useful thing you can know before deciding what to study or where to apply.
This blog covers the 7 highest-paying IT roles in Pune in 2026. For each one, we share real salary ranges, the names of companies actually hiring in the city, and what you need to get there.
Quick answer: highest-paying IT jobs in Pune in 2026 by starting salary:
- AI/ML Engineer: ₹8–14 LPA fresher (GCC), ₹28–45 LPA mid-level
- Data Scientist: ₹6–10 LPA fresher, ₹22–36 LPA mid-level
- Cloud and DevOps Engineer: ₹5–8 LPA fresher, ₹20–34 LPA mid-level
- Data Engineer: ₹5–8 LPA fresher, ₹20–32 LPA mid-level
- Python Full Stack Developer: ₹4–7 LPA fresher, ₹18–28 LPA mid-level
- Automation Test Engineer: ₹4–6 LPA fresher, ₹9–13 LPA mid-level
- Cybersecurity Engineer: ₹5–8 LPA fresher, ₹15–28 LPA mid-level
GCC roles in Pune pay 25–60% more than IT services roles for the same position and experience level. [Source: PlugScale GCC Salary Benchmark India 2026.]
Why Pune’s IT salaries are rising faster than most cities
Before going role by role, there is one thing worth understanding about how Pune’s salary market actually works. It explains why two engineers doing the same role in the same city can earn so differently.
Pune now has over 350 Global Capability Centres operating across Hinjewadi, Kharadi, Viman Nagar, Magarpatta, and Yerwada. These are not IT services companies taking on client projects. They are wholly-owned subsidiaries of global companies: Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Mastercard, Goldman Sachs, Siemens, Mercedes-Benz. When you work at a GCC, you are on the global company’s payroll, benchmarked against their global compensation standards, not Indian IT services norms.
According to the PlugScale GCC Salary Benchmark India 2026, Pune salaries sit at 78 to 84% of Bangalore’s level for comparable GCC roles, and they are rising. GCC pay scales run 25 to 60% above IT services companies for the same role. That gap is the reason two freshers from the same graduation batch can earn ₹3.6 LPA and ₹9 LPA in the same city at the same time.
Every salary number in this blog is presented with that context in mind. The company type matters as much as the role title.
1. AI and ML Engineer: the highest ceiling in Pune’s IT market
If you want to understand where Pune’s IT salary ceiling actually sits in 2026, look at AI and ML engineering. It is not just the highest-paying tech role in the city. It is the fastest-growing one, and the talent supply has not caught up with demand.
What this role actually involves
An AI/ML Engineer designs, trains, and tests machine learning models against real data and deploys them for use by other systems. By 2026, this has expanded to Gen AI work, including the development of apps with LangChain, integration with OpenAI APIs, creation of RAG pipelines, and fine-tuning large language models to meet specific business requirements.
This is not just simple data crunching. It’s engineering for manufacturing AI systems.
Salary in Pune in 2026
The salary premium for AI and ML engineers is significant and well-documented. According to the PlugScale GCC Salary Benchmark India 2026, AI engineers command a 40 to 60% premium over equivalent-experience backend engineers in India’s GCC ecosystem.
| Experience | Salary at IT services | Salary at GCC in Pune |
| Fresher (0 to 1 year) | ₹5 to 8 LPA | ₹8 to 14 LPA |
| Mid-level (3 to 5 years) | ₹12 to 18 LPA | ₹28 to 45 LPA |
| Senior (6 to 9 years) | ₹20 to 30 LPA | ₹48 to 72 LPA |
These figures are indicative and vary based on skills, portfolio strength, and specific employer. Candidates with Gen AI project experience consistently land at the higher end of these ranges.
Who is hiring in Pune?
Mastercard India Tech Hub (Kharadi), Deutsche Bank India Technology, HSBC Technology India, Bajaj Finserv, Persistent Systems, and a growing number of AI-first startups in Baner and Hinjewadi. All run active AI and ML engineering teams in Pune.
What do you need to get there?
Python is non-negotiable. Beyond that: solid machine learning fundamentals, experience with at least one deep learning framework (TensorFlow or PyTorch), and in 2026, some Gen AI exposure; even a single project using LangChain or the OpenAI API puts a fresher ahead of most applicants. A deployed ML project on GitHub is the clearest signal a hiring team can see.
Teknowell’s data science and AI course in Pune covers Python, ML, deep learning, Gen AI integration, and Power BI with live project work on real datasets throughout the course.
2. Data Scientist: Pune’s most in-demand GCC hire
Data science isn’t new, but what companies expect from data scientists in 2026 has. Classical ML skills are the new baseline. The best candidates will be those who can blend ML with Gen AI fluency, subject matter expertise, and the ability to communicate findings to non-technical stakeholders.
What this role involves
A data scientist spends their time cleaning and exploring data, building predictive or classification models, evaluating model performance, and turning the results into something a business team can act on. And many data scientists will be using Gen AI tools by 2026, using LLMs to make analytics features smarter or to automate the generation of insights.
The output is not a webpage or application. It’s a recommendation, a prediction, or an AI-powered feature that someone else integrates into a product.
Salary in Pune in 2026
The average data scientist salary in Pune in 2026 ranges from ₹6 LPA to ₹18 LPA depending on experience, skills, and company type. Freshers in Pune with strong Python skills, ML knowledge, and real project portfolios typically earn between ₹4.5 LPA and ₹8 LPA at entry level. At BFSI GCCs in Kharadi and Viman Nagar, well-prepared freshers with Gen AI skills are seeing packages of ₹8 to 12 LPA.
| Experience | Salary range in Pune |
| Fresher (0 to 1 year) | ₹4.5 to 10 LPA |
| Mid-level (3 to 5 years) | ₹14 to 24 LPA |
| Senior (5 plus years) | ₹24 to 40 LPA (GCC) |
Skills like NLP, computer vision, cloud computing integration, and MLOps further push earning potential at the mid and senior levels.
Who is hiring in Pune?
Every BFSI GCC in Pune runs a data science function. Mastercard India, Deutsche Bank India Technology, Barclays India, Bajaj Finserv, HSBC Technology, and Citi India all have active data science teams. Beyond finance, Volkswagen IT India and Siemens Digital Industries also hire data professionals for automotive and industrial analytics.
What you need
Python, Pandas, Scikit-learn, SQL at a solid level, Power BI or Tableau for visualisation, and statistics — specifically comfort with probability, model evaluation metrics, and hypothesis testing. Gen AI exposure is not required for every fresher role but is a genuine salary differentiator. A deployed project that demonstrates the full pipeline from raw data to model output to visualised result is what stands out in interviews.
If you are still deciding between data science and full stack development as a Python path, that comparison is worth reading before committing: Python for data science vs web development.
3. Cloud and DevOps Engineer: the infrastructure that everything runs on
Most people think of this role as setting up servers, and there’s a version of this role. That’s not 2026. Cloud and DevOps engineers, who build and maintain the infrastructure that runs every AI system, every web application, every data pipeline, are among the highest-paid professionals in Pune’s IT ecosystem.
What this role involves
Cloud engineers provision infrastructure via AWS, Azure or Google Cloud and manage security, networking and operations at scale. DevOps engineers are working on the automation layer. CI/CD pipelines, Docker containers, Kubernetes orchestration, Terraform for infrastructure as code. These two functions overlap to a large extent in most mid-to-senior roles.
FinOps cloud cost optimisation is now a high-end specialism. Engineers who can reduce cloud spending without degrading performance are in particularly high demand at GCCs managing large infrastructure budgets.
Salary in Pune in 2026
According to the PlugScale GCC Salary Benchmark India 2026, DevOps engineers with Kubernetes, Terraform, and multi-cloud experience consistently command senior-level packages even at 4 to 6 years of experience.
| Experience | Salary range in Pune |
| Fresher with certification | ₹5 to 8 LPA |
| Mid-level (3 to 5 years) | ₹20 to 34 LPA (GCC) |
| Senior (6 to 9 years) | ₹36 to 55 LPA (GCC) |
Adding FinOps or multi-cloud expertise to a cloud profile adds a 15 to 25% salary premium at mid-level and above.
Who is hiring in Pune?
GCCs across all sectors, Persistent Systems, KPIT Technologies, Siemens Digital Industries, Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation Pune, Bosch. Every company running cloud infrastructure, which in 2026 is essentially every company of any scale, needs cloud and DevOps engineers.
What you need
AWS Cloud Practitioner or Azure AZ-900 as an entry-level certification. Docker and Kubernetes basics, CI/CD pipeline experience, Terraform fundamentals, Linux command line proficiency, and Git. The cloud computing course covers all of this, and the details on AWS versus Azure, fees, and which certification to target first are in the cloud computing course in Pune guide.
4. Data Engineer: the less talked-about high earner
Data scientists grab the limelight in any salary discussion relating to data. Data engineers earn similar or higher salaries than data scientists and are always hard to recruit. This position lies between software engineering and data infrastructure, and GCC in Pune requires many of them.
What this role involves
Data engineers build the pipeline through which data flows from its origin to where it will be used by data scientists and data analysts. Data integration pipelines, data warehouses, stream processing in real time with Apache Kafka/Spark, and cloud services for data management like AWS Glue and Azure Data Factory. If the data scientist says that there is no data available to him, then there is an issue with data engineering.
Salary in Pune in 2026
| Experience | Salary range in Pune |
| Fresher (0 to 1 year) | ₹5 to 8 LPA |
| Mid-level (3 to 5 years) | ₹20 to 32 LPA (GCC) |
| Senior (6 to 9 years) | ₹34 to 52 LPA (GCC) |
Who is hiring
BFSI GCCs generate enormous data volumes and need significant data engineering capacity to manage them. Mastercard India, Deutsche Bank India Technology, and Barclays India all have active data engineering teams in Pune. BMW Group India and Siemens Digital Industries hire for automotive data pipelines.
What you need
Python and SQL at a strong level, Spark basics, familiarity with at least one cloud data platform (AWS Glue, Azure Data Factory), and Git. This role is often a natural progression for students who complete a data science course and find they prefer the engineering and infrastructure side to the modelling side.
5. Python Full Stack Developer: product companies and GCCs both want this profile
Python Full Stack Development sits at a salary level that surprises most freshers when they first see the GCC-level packages available. The reason is that a strong full stack developer is not just writing code; they are owning an entire application from the backend logic to the deployed product, and in 2026, increasingly integrating AI features into what they build.
What this role involves
On the backend, Python Full Stack Developers use Django or FastAPI to build the server-side logic APIs, authentication, database management, and business rules. On the frontend, they connect this to a React interface. The result is a complete, deployable web application that users can interact with. In 2026, full stack developers who can also integrate LLM APIs and build AI-powered features sit in a noticeably higher salary bracket than those who cannot.
Salary in Pune in 2026
| Experience | Salary range in Pune |
| Fresher (0 to 1 year) | ₹4 to 7 LPA |
| Mid-level (3 to 5 years) | ₹18 to 28 LPA |
| Senior (6 plus years) | ₹30 to 44 LPA (GCC) |
Who is hiring
Startups and product companies in Baner, Balewadi, and Wakad hire consistently. GCCs like Workday India and Emerson run Python-heavy backends and hire full-stack developers in Pune. Every company building a web product needs this profile.
What you need
Django or FastAPI for backend, React for frontend, SQL and MongoDB for databases, REST API design, Git, and basic AWS deployment. Two to three deployed projects on GitHub that show the full stack, not just one isolated piece, are what differentiate candidates in interviews.
Teknowell offers separate full stack development tracks in Python (Django), MERN, Java, PHP, and .NET. The Python full stack development course covers Django, React, databases, REST APIs, cloud fundamentals, and live project work throughout the training period.
6. Automation Test Engineer: underrated salary, very consistent hiring
Software testing is not the most glamorous topic in IT career conversations. It is, however, one of the most consistently hireable profiles in Pune’s market and at the automation level pays significantly better than most freshers expect.
What this role involves
Automation Testing engineers produce software to test software. Selenium for user interface testing, RestAssured or Postman for API testing, Playwright or Cypress as new options, and integrated into CI/CD pipelines such that they execute tests automatically with every deployment of code. In 2026, AI-assisted testing software is becoming one of the tools in the toolbox of forward-thinking product companies and GCCs.
Testing without automation is a different and less remunerative career path. The pay differential mentioned in this section applies exclusively to automation engineers capable of writing and maintaining test scripts and integrating them with CI/CD, and performing performance testing at the senior level.
Salary in Pune in 2026
According to Glassdoor’s Pune test automation engineer salary data based on 2026 submissions, the average salary for a test automation engineer in Pune is approximately ₹9 LPA, with a typical range of ₹5 to ₹12.7 LPA. Senior-level automation engineers in Pune with 7 to 9 years of experience report packages of ₹21 to ₹24 LPA.
| Experience | Salary range in Pune |
| Fresher with automation skills | ₹4 to 6 LPA |
| Mid-level (3 to 5 years) | ₹8 to 13 LPA |
| Senior with CI/CD and performance testing | ₹14 to 24 LPA |
Who is hiring
Every product company, every GCC, and every IT services firm maintains a QA function. Persistent Systems, TCS Digital, Infosys, Barclays India, Deutsche Bank India Technology, and Accenture all hire automation engineers in Pune actively.
What you need
Selenium with Java or Python is the most common entry requirement. API testing tools (Postman, RestAssured), basic CI/CD pipeline knowledge for integrating tests, SQL for database testing, and Git. Adding performance testing skills (JMeter, k6) at mid-level creates a significant salary jump. The Teknowell software testing course covers manual to automation progression with Selenium, API testing, and placement preparation.
7. Cybersecurity Engineer: BFSI GCCs paying a consistent premium
Cybersecurity sits at the higher end of Pune’s IT salary table for a structural reason. With India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act now in full implementation, cybersecurity has shifted from a support function to a strategic priority at every financial services company. BFSI GCCs in Pune are hiring cybersecurity professionals faster than the talent supply is growing.
What this role involves
Application security (AppSec), identity and access management (IAM), cloud security, threat intelligence, and SOC analysis. At GCCs specifically, cybersecurity engineers often work on global security operations, meaning the work is both technically demanding and internationally visible.
Salary in Pune in 2026
| Experience | Salary range in Pune |
| Fresher (0 to 1 year) | ₹5 to 8 LPA |
| Mid-level (3 to 5 years) | ₹15 to 28 LPA |
| Senior | ₹28 to 45 LPA |
Who is hiring
JPMorgan India, Goldman Sachs India, HSBC Technology, Deutsche Bank India Technology, and Barclays India all run active cybersecurity teams in Pune. Per the PlugScale GCC benchmark, cybersecurity engineers carry above-market premiums specifically in BFSI and fintech, where regulatory requirements make this function non-optional.
What you need
Cloud security fundamentals, networking basics, and at least one certification CompTIA Security+ or Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) as starting points. This role is often built on top of a cloud or networking background rather than entered directly. Engineers who combine cloud skills with security knowledge are in a particularly strong position.
GCC vs IT services vs product company: what the salary difference actually looks like
This is the context that makes every salary number above meaningful. The same role title means a different salary depending on where in Pune’s ecosystem you land.
| Company type | Salary premium over IT services | Examples in Pune |
| GCC (BFSI) | 40 to 60% above IT services | Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Mastercard, Barclays |
| GCC (Tech and ER&D) | 25 to 40% above IT services | Mercedes-Benz, Siemens, Bosch, Workday |
| Product companies | 15 to 30% above IT services | Persistent Systems, KPIT, mid-size SaaS |
| IT services | 15 to 30% above IT services | TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL |
GCC roles pay more because they are benchmarked against global compensation standards rather than Indian IT services market rates. The tradeoff is that GCC roles have a higher preparation bar; technical interviews are more rigorous, project depth matters more, and communication skills are evaluated in every round because global team interaction is part of the job.
The full breakdown of how to get into a GCC role in Pune, which companies hire, how they find candidates, and what they look for is covered in the GCC jobs Pune guide.
What actually separates candidates who land the higher-paying roles
Reading salary tables is easy. The harder question is what separates the fresher who lands ₹4 LPA from the one who lands ₹9 LPA in the same city in the same year.
It comes down to three things, consistently.
Real project portfolios, not tutorial exercises. A GitHub profile with two or three deployed applications that solve real problems, with documentation explaining technical decisions, is what GCC technical interviewers look for. They will probe every project on the resume. If the project is a tutorial replica, that shows in the interview within minutes.
Certification plus skills, not just skills. For cloud and data roles especially, the fresher with an AWS Cloud Practitioner or Azure AZ-900 certification alongside their course training is in a smaller, better-compensated candidate pool than one without. Certifications are objective signals that HR teams filter on before a human looks at the resume.
Interview preparation that matches the target. GCC technical interviews are different from IT services assessments. They test problem-solving at a real depth, expect you to explain your project decisions, and evaluate communication in the technical round itself, not just the HR round. A fresher who has done 10 mock interviews in GCC format before their first real one performs materially differently from one who has not.
The students who land the higher-paying roles in Pune are not necessarily the most talented people in the batch. They are the ones who prepared specifically for where they wanted to go rather than preparing generically for any IT job.
If getting into the higher-paying half of Pune’s IT salary table is the goal, the preparation needs to match that from the start of training. Teknowell’s courses in Pimpri Chinchwad are built around this: real projects deployed during the course, internship assistance, and mock interview preparation modelled on actual GCC and product company formats.
Book a free demo class at Teknowell Pimpri Chinchwad and see how the data science, full stack, cloud, and software testing programmes are structured before making any decision. There is no commitment involved just a live session with real curriculum content so you can make an informed choice.
The salary ceiling in Pune is higher than most freshers realise
The full range of IT salaries in Pune in 2026 is wider than it has ever been. Entry-level IT services roles start at ₹3.5 LPA. Senior AI engineers at GCCs earn ₹48 to 72 LPA. Between those two ends is a spectrum of roles, company types, and preparation paths that a fresher can deliberately position toward.
The data scientist salary in Pune 2026, the cloud engineer salary Pune numbers, the automation testing figures none of these are outcomes that happen passively. They are the result of choosing the right track, building the right skills, and preparing specifically for the companies that pay at that level.
The best IT career for high salary in Pune in 2026 is the one that matches both the work you want to do and the preparation you are willing to invest in getting there. If the GCC salary table at the top of this page makes a specific role stand out, that is where the research should go next.
