LONDON, England: One hundred-year-old British automaker Jaguar Land Rover, owned by India's Tata Motors, aims to hire hundreds of laid off engineers to help develop electric vehicles.

This week, Jaguar Land Rover announced the opening of a jobs portal for displaced tech workers to fill 800 positions spanning self-driving, electrification, machine learning and data science.

In an effort to become an "electric-first' business by 2025, the company said it believed workers leaving big tech companies, such as Amazon, had the required skills to fill new roles in the UK, Ireland, the U.S., India, China and Hungary.

In an online interview, Chief Information Officer Anthony Battle said most of the new jobs will be located in the UK, stating, "We have had vacancies there for quite a long time. Some of the capabilities are quite difficult to fill because it is a very competitive market, particularly for software engineers and architects," he said, as quoted by Reuters.

"It is fortuitous for us, and definitely others, that there is now this huge availability of talent at a time when we have already planned to move forward," he added.

The announcement drive comes after thousands of layoffs in recent weeks at U.S. tech firms, such as Twitter, Meta and Amazon.

Battle said that the new jobs, especially in artificial intelligence and machine learning, will facilitate the collection of data collection on car performance and customer behavior.

Last year, Jaguar Land Rover announced an electrification strategy aimed at making all Jaguar cars fully electric by 2024.