Lead AI/ML Engineer in Pune | VOPA | ₹12-14 LPA

VOPA

VOPA is a Pune-based nonprofit working to make sure every child in a government school can read, write and do basic maths. It builds free technology that teachers and education departments actually use, including tools that assess how well children are learning and show where help is needed. Its work runs at state scale in Maharashtra, reaching lakhs of children through the public school system. The team believes good technology, given away free, can lift learning for children who have the least. This role sits within VOPA's Technology Development team, which designs and runs the AI products behind these learning tools.

Role

As Lead AI/ML Engineer, you will own the full life of VOPA's AI work, from framing the problem and building data pipelines to training models, putting them into production, and keeping them fast and reliable. The role mixes hands-on engineering with leadership: you will set the technical direction, mentor other engineers, hold the bar on quality, and work closely with product, backend, mobile and data teams. You will also test new AI technologies and bring in the ones that make the product better for teachers and children.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development and deployment of AI-powered products for production use.
• Drive technical architecture and decisions across machine learning models, inference systems, cloud infrastructure and distributed computing.
• Build and maintain end-to-end machine learning pipelines covering data ingestion, model training, evaluation, deployment, monitoring and ongoing tuning.
• Design AI services that are secure, fast and able to handle production-scale workloads.
• Mentor engineers and run code and design reviews.
• Set and promote best practices for software quality, testing, performance, observability, reliability and maintainability.
• Work closely with product, backend, mobile and data teams to deliver AI solutions that meet real business needs.
• Research and evaluate new AI technologies and put the useful ones into the product.
• Optimise and scale large language models and other AI models for production inference.
• Keep systems observable and debug issues quickly when production behaviour changes.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning or a related technical field.
• Minimum 4 years of hands-on experience building, deploying and maintaining production-grade AI/ML systems.
• Strong Python skills, with solid software engineering, object-oriented programming and system design ability.
• Wide experience with modern machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch, Hugging Face or TensorFlow.
• Proven experience deploying, optimising and scaling large language models for production inference.
• Good understanding of containers and cloud-native tools including Docker, Kubernetes, AWS and distributed system architectures.
• Track record of leading technical work, mentoring engineers and making sound architecture decisions.
• Strong analytical, debugging, communication and problem-solving skills.
• Preferred: hands-on work with large language models, computer vision, speech recognition, generative AI or multimodal AI systems.
• Preferred: experience with model optimisation and inference tools such as quantisation, distributed training, vLLM, TensorRT or ONNX Runtime.
• Preferred: experience building AI solutions for education, the public sector or other large-scale social impact work.
• Able to join immediately.
• Based in or willing to work from Kothrud, Pune.

Benefits

• Lead the AI engineering function and set the technical direction for products used at state scale.
• Build technology that reaches lakhs of children in government schools.
• Work with product, backend, mobile and data teams on problems that have not been solved before.
• Room to test and adopt new AI technologies rather than only maintaining old systems.
• Annual compensation of ₹12 to ₹14 LPA, depending on last drawn salary, interview and skills.

Apply

Interested candidates can apply through the link given below

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