In defence technology, the team is the capability

India's defence indigenisation is usually debated in capital, policy, and platforms. The real constraint is narrower: whether a deep-tech company can attract and keep the engineers it needs. In less than 30 months, Sanlayan went from nine people to 105, and from a 2,500 sq ft office to over 15,000 sq ft in Bengaluru, with more than half of spend going into R&D. The numbers matter less than what they prove. In defence technology, the team is the capability, and the proving is still ahead.

India's defence indigenisation effort is usually discussed in the language of capital, policy, and platforms. Funding rounds, procurement reform, the list of systems a company intends to build. These matter. But none of them is the constraint that decides whether a deep-tech defence company actually delivers.

The constraint is people. Specifically, whether you can attract engineers with deep technical capability into a sector that, for most of their careers, did not present itself as a serious option, and whether you can keep them once they arrive.

Sanlayan builds radar, electronic warfare, and avionics systems in Bengaluru. That last detail is not incidental. Bengaluru is the most competitive engineering talent market in India. The companies hiring against us are not just other defence firms. They are the global IT and product companies operating a few kilometres away, with longer brand histories and deeper compensation budgets.

We do not win that contest on compensation. We are competitive on pay, but we are not going to outspend a company that has been recruiting at scale for two decades. What we offer instead is the nature of the work. An engineer at Sanlayan builds systems that India's Armed Forces depend on to protect and strengthen the country's strategic capability with the agility of a startup. That is a different proposition from optimising a consumer funnel, and the engineers we most want to hire know the difference.

At our townhall last week, the year became legible in a way that day-to-day work does not allow. We began 2025 as a team of nine. The group is now 105, and Sanlayan itself is scaling quickly in both talent and infrastructure.

The infrastructure tells the same story. Just over a year ago we operated out of a 2,500 sq ft office on HAL Old Airport Road. We now work across more than 15,000 sq ft in Bengaluru, including a new RF Integration Facility in Electronics City. Floor space is not an achievement in itself. It matters because RF integration requires controlled, instrumented environments that you cannot improvise. The facility is what allows the engineering to happen.

Headcount on its own is a weak signal. A defence company can hire quickly and still build slowly if the team is assembled wrong. What I pay closer attention to is composition and method.

The name Sanlayan comes from the Sanskrit for fusion, and the idea is literal in how we have built the team. We need the speed of young engineers and the judgement that comes from people who have spent years inside programs that cannot fail. In-house development and acquired capability. One without the other does not hold.

The method follows from this. Our hardware, firmware, and software teams do not work in sequence, handing artefacts down a line. They co-create, in the same rooms, against the same operational requirements. Those requirements come from the end user. We build for the real conditions the Armed Forces operate in, not for a specification abstracted away from them. More than half of what we spend goes into R&D, which is the clearest statement we can make about where the work actually is.

The values we operate by were not handed down. The team wrote them together, which is the only way values survive contact with a hard quarter. Velocity, ownership, the willingness to debate hard and then commit fully. They describe how this group already worked before we gave them names.

Download Sanlayan Values.

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We are still early. Thirty months is not a track record in a sector where trust is measured across program cycles, not financial years. The systems we are building have to prove themselves where it matters most, and most of that proving is still ahead of us. But the thing that compounds in this sector is not headcount or floor space. It is the quality of the people a mission can attract, and whether the work keeps being worth their time. On that measure, the year behind us has closed a meaningful distance. Closing it further is the work now.

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Sanlayan is hiring across hardware, firmware, and software engineering. If the problem described here is the kind of work you want to spend the next decade on, or you know someone who should, our talent team would like to hear from you. Write to careers@sanlayan.com.