Elon Musk’s Starlink begins hiring for India rollout

Months after receiving approval to launch satellite internet services in India, Elon Musk-owned Starlink Satellite Communications Pvt. Ltd has begun hiring in the country.

The SpaceX-owned company is hiring in finance and accounting domains—for roles like payments manager, accounting manager, senior treasury analyst, and tax manager—as part of its first recruitment drive, according to information on the SpaceX website and professional networking site LinkedIn.

All the profiles are based in Bengaluru.

“As the company expands its international footprint and provides Starlink (our revolutionary satellite low-latency broadband internet) across the globe, Starlink Satellite Communications, a wholly-owned subsidiary of SpaceX, is seeking an accounting manager based in India to help ensure our financial reporting obligations are met,” SpaceX said in its job description for the position.

“Based in Bangalore (Bengaluru), the Accounting Manager will play a key role in defining and scaling the accounting, reporting and statutory compliance activities to support India operations,” it read.

In all its job postings, the company said it will be prioritizing local applicants who have the right to work in the country. It added that remote or hybrid work will not be considered.

Starlink is currently installing the required infrastructure to launch its satellite internet services in the country by the end of this year or early next year. It has also begun security trials for its internet infrastructure to meet the Indian government’s norms.

Starlink will compete with Eutelsat OneWeb and Jio Satellite, which have also received clearance to offer satellite internet services.

Rollout challenges

The only hurdle, however, is the allocation of spectrum to these companies, on which the department of telecommunications (DoT) and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) are still working.

“Its (Starlink’s) mission is to deliver global internet access, and it is ideally suited to support rural and geographically isolated areas where internet connectivity is unreliable or nonexistent,” SpaceX said in the job posting.

Earlier in October, Starlink’s director, Parnil Urdhwareshe, said in an industry event that a large part of its capacity will remain underutilized in the country if rural users are not brought onto its soon-to-be-launched satellite internet services. Rural users are fundamental to how its network operates, Urdhwareshe added.

Comments from Starlink came as telecom operators had expressed concerns that satellite internet services would compete with them and eat into their market share by targeting elite users in urban areas.

“We are now in over 150 markets and in every single one of those markets, the goal has always been to complement existing services and be able to ensure that a similar quality of internet is available whether in urban regions or in rural regions,” Urdhwareshe had said.

The pricing of Starlink’s broadband services has not yet been disclosed. The company currently has over 8,400 satellites in orbit.

To be sure, in 2021, before even getting the licence, Starlink had set up India operations with Sanjay Bhargava as the country director.

Bhargava left the company after Starlink was directed by the government to call off the pre-bookings it had done at that time. In compliance with the DoT’s order, the company returned the booking amount to over 5,000 pre-booked customers.

In July, Starlink received the authorization from the Indian National Space Promotion & Authorization Centre, or IN-SPACe, for its Gen 1 constellation capacity over India, according to the space regulator’s website.

This was a month after the company was granted the critical Global Mobile Personal Communications by Satellite (GMPCS) licence, marking a major milestone in its entry into the Indian market, after a three-year wait.