Manjeri Startups Are Hiring Remote Engineers From Other Small Towns, Not Just Bangalore

A company based at Silicon Jeri in Manjeri recently filled an engineering role with someone who lives 400 kilometers away, in a small town most people outside Tamil Nadu have never heard of. That engineer has never visited Manjeri. He has no plan to move there either.

This is not a one-off. It is a small but real pattern showing up at some companies based at the Silicon Jeri campus. They are not just hiring people who move to Manjeri, or people who commute from Bangalore. Some are hiring engineers who stay exactly where they are, in their own small towns, and just log in.

Why are Manjeri companies hiring engineers who never plan to move here?

The short answer is that the work does not require anyone to be in the same room. Software engineering, quality testing, and product support can happen over a laptop and an internet connection. That fact is not new. What is newer is who is choosing to build a team this way, and where they are choosing to look.

A company based at the Silicon Jeri campus in Manjeri already runs on a mix of people. Some work from the campus itself. Some work from home in the same district. And a growing number work from somewhere else entirely, connected only through a screen and a shared calendar. This last group is the interesting one. Here is the part most people miss: many of these hires are not from big cities either. They are from other small towns.

That is a break from the usual script. The usual script for remote work in India has been small town to big city to remote, meaning a person leaves their hometown, works in a metro for a few years to build a resume, and only then gets offered a remote role because they are now considered “proven.” Manjeri-based hiring is starting to skip that middle step for some candidates.

What does small town to small town hiring actually look like?

Picture a composite, illustrative case. A company based at Silicon Jeri needs a backend developer. Instead of posting only on city job boards, someone on the team posts in a coding community group that includes members from small towns across South India. A candidate from a small town in interior Karnataka applies. He has no metro job history. What he has is a working app he built on his own and a habit of answering questions in that same community group. He gets hired, and he keeps living where he already lives.

This is not a documented case with a name attached. It is a pattern that founders in this ecosystem describe when asked how their hiring actually works, and it matches what companies at the campus report when they talk about where new hires come from.

Here is a simple way to see how this differs from the older default.

Why might a small-town-founded company be especially open to this pattern?

This is where the Manjeri story matters. Silicon Jeri exists because its founder, Sabeer Nelli, built a career in tech and then chose to put resources into a small town rather than only a metro. A founder who grew up outside a major metro often carries a lived sense of what it takes for someone in a small town to get a real shot. That is not something you can fully learn from a hiring manual.

Now here is the part that surprises people. A company that grew up believing “you do not need to be in a metro to do good work” has a simple reason to extend that same belief to its hiring. If a founder can build a company from Manjeri, it is a short logical step to hire an engineer from another town like Manjeri, wherever that town happens to be.

This does not mean every company at the campus hires this way, or that it is written policy anywhere. It means the underlying belief that made the campus possible in the first place also makes this kind of hiring feel normal rather than risky.

What does this mean for engineers outside big cities?

For a candidate, the biggest shift is what counts as proof of skill. Under the old pattern, a metro job was often the proof. Under this newer pattern, a working project, a public code repository, or a track record of answering questions well in a developer community can do the same job.

Some of what this could mean over time, if the pattern holds:

• Lower pressure to migrate. An engineer does not have to uproot family or take on city rent just to get a first real tech role.
• Income stays local. A salary earned remotely and spent in a small town supports local shops, rent, and services in that town, not a metro’s economy.
• A reverse pull, not just a one-way exit. Instead of talent draining out of small towns permanently, some of it can stay and still connect to real companies.
• A wider net for hiring companies. A company based at Silicon Jeri that only hires from Bangalore is competing with every other company that hires from Bangalore. Looking at other small towns opens up candidates fewer people are competing for.

A separate part of this same story is who gets a first chance at all, including candidates who did not go through English-medium, city-based schooling. Our piece on Malayalam-medium and first-generation coders looks at that angle directly.

Is this a common hiring pattern yet, or still early?

Honestly, it is still early. What exists today is a visible thread, not a proven model. A handful of companies based at the Silicon Jeri campus have made hires this way, and founders talk about it as a direction they want to lean into more, not as a settled playbook with years of data behind it.

There are real limits too. Some roles genuinely need someone on campus, at least part of the time, especially early in a company’s life when a lot of work happens through fast, in-person conversation. Remote hiring also asks more of a company’s own process, clear written communication, tools that work well over a distance, and managers who are comfortable leading people they rarely see face to face. Not every small company has that in place yet.

So the fair way to describe this pattern is: real, worth watching, and still forming. It is one more sign that Manjeri’s tech story is not only about who moves here. It is also about who the campus’s companies choose to reach, wherever that person happens to be sitting.

Companies at Silicon Jeri, a shared tech campus in Manjeri, are open to talking through how this kind of hiring works in practice. A short call to +91 97783 49944 is a simple way to start that conversation, whether you are a company thinking about your next hire or an engineer in a small town wondering if this applies to you.

Related reading: If you run a company and want a fuller playbook on this approach, our guide to building remote and satellite teams from Manjeri covers it in more depth. We also look at how Silicon Jeri is widening who gets into tech, and at the basics of remote work as a working model.