Most global companies open an India centre to spend less. This one opened to hire the most expensive engineers in the market first, and the India GCC strategy behind that decision reshaped everything from interview panels to who gets stock.Ajeya Motaganahalli spent 25 years inside enterprise storage across EMC, NetApp and Honeywell before founding Pure Storage's India R&D centre in January 2022. That centre, now roughly 743 people inside a company valued near 39 billion dollars, was built on a deliberate rejection of the offshore playbook. His first hires were all senior architects, because the standard one senior to ten junior ratio is, in his words, a template for failure that creates an army of mediocre without leadership. Speaking with host Satish Mugulavalli in this episode powered by Hissa Fund, he explains why expats were flown in to seed culture rather than teach engineering, why salaries adjust for purchasing power but employee stock options never should, and why fresh graduates in Bangalore receive equity on the same internal band as engineers in Santa Clara. With India GCC attrition running at 16 percent and AI rewriting the engineering hiring bar, the timing is hard to ignore.👉Why hiring junior engineers first quietly destroys an India R&D centre, and what the inverted pyramid does instead👉How Pure Storage brought expats to Bangalore to model cultural behaviour, not to transfer product or engineering skills👉What the lifeboat exercise reveals about retention that performance ratings structurally cannot capture👉Why Ajeya refuses to anchor an offer to a candidate's previous salary, calling it a defeatist proposition that becomes a perpetual problem👉How AI moved an agent from MTS2 to MTS4 competence, shifting the bottleneck from writing code to reviewing it👉Why employee stock options India strategy should stay globally uniform even when cash is localised for purchasing power parity, and why campus hires get equity from day one.Subscribe to Built to Share for weekly founder conversations and follow Satish Mugulavalli on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/satishmugulavalli/] for daily insights.00:00 - From EMC to NetApp to Pure Storage02:04 - Why Cost Arbitrage GCCs Are Dying06:33 - Blast Radius: Measuring Real Engineer Impact08:33 - The Inverted Pyramid India Hiring Model11:24 - Why Expats Seed Culture, Not Skills20:47 - The Hardest Hire He Ever Made29:42 - Running A Startup Inside A Giant36:28 - How AI Changed The Engineering Bar41:09 - Cash Is Local, Equity Is Global01:00:29 - Stock For Campus Hires And Attrition #AjeyaMotaganahalli #PureStorage #Everpure #BuiltToShare #SatishMugulavalli #HissaFund #IndiaGCC #GCCStrategy #GCCHiringIndia #IndiaRandD #BangaloreTech #EmployeeStockOptionsIndia #ESOPvsRSU #EngineeringCulture #TechHiringIndia #AIEngineeringJobs #StartupEquity #TalentRetention #EnterpriseStorage #GlobalCapabilityCentre