After San Francisco, Meta Brings Its OpenEnv AI Hackathon to India with a $30,000 Prize Pool

Winners Get Direct Interview Access to Meta and Hugging Face AI Teams

March 20, Bangalore, India: After running in San Francisco, the OpenEnv AI Hackathon is now coming to India. Organised by Scaler School of Technology (SST) in collaboration with Meta, Hugging Face, and PyTorch, the national-level hackathon will give developers a rare opportunity to build on the same infrastructure used to train next-generation AI systems.

The event focuses on OpenEnv, an open-source framework for building reinforcement learning environments that power AI agents that learn by interacting with dynamic real world environments rather than static datasets. Participants will use OpenEnv to ship environments that contribute to the global open-source ecosystem.

Unlike traditional hackathons centered around short demos, this event focuses on building real infrastructure. The most promising projects will be evaluated by the Meta team during the finale at the Scaler School of Technology campus in Bangalore.

Top-performing teams will receive $30,000 in prizes and an opportunity to interview with the AI teams at Meta and Hugging Face, allowing their work in the competition to effectively serve as their application. The hackathon will run in multiple stages, beginning with an online round and culminating in a 48-hour in-person finale at the Scaler School of Technology campus in Bangalore, where finalists will build alongside other top teams and interact with engineers working on advanced AI systems.

To make the event accessible to a broader developer audience, organisers will also provide free preparatory training modules, allowing participants with little or no prior experience in reinforcement learning to get up to speed before the competition begins. The initiative is expected to attract over 70,000 developers positioning it as one of the largest AI-focused hackathons ever organised in India.

For India’s developer community, the arrival of the OpenEnv hackathon signals a shift. Access to frontier AI infrastructure, particularly reinforcement learning environments used to train autonomous agents, has historically been concentrated within a handful of research labs and tech hubs.

Bringing the initiative to India gives thousands of developers a chance to work directly with those systems, contribute to the open-source ecosystem around them, and have their work evaluated by some of the engineers building the next generation of AI.

Registrations for the hackathon are currently open, with the competition set to begin in late March and conclude with the Bangalore finale at the end of April. Developers can register here