# Lead AI Engineer

**Company**: Helpshift
**Location**: Pune, Maharashtra, India
**Work arrangement**: hybrid
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://apply.workable.com/j/91E59A0696
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_3986b7f9-290

## Description

About the role:
You will be part of the AI team responsible for building next-generation AI capabilities at Helpshift. The team works on various projects, including AI Agents for automated issue resolution, User Intent Detection, AI-Powered Answers and Knowledge Base Enhancements, Agent CoPilot for agent productivity, and LLM-based systems, proprietary ML models, and multimodal RAG pipelines.

About the team:
The team includes Backend Engineers, Full-stack Developers, ML Engineers, Data Scientists, and Frontend Developers—collaborating to deliver intelligent and scalable AI experiences.

Responsibilities:
- Lead and mentor a team of backend and frontend developers, fostering a high-performing, collaborative engineering culture.
- Own the technical direction, architecture, and strategy for LLM, AI Agent, and ML initiatives.
- Architect and build AI Agents, RAG pipelines (including multimodal RAG), LLM-based services, and evaluation frameworks.
- Design, build, and deploy scalable AI/ML systems from concept to production.
- Collaborate closely with PMs, ML Engineers, and Data Scientists to convert business requirements into AI-driven solutions.
- Oversee full SDLC for your squad—ensuring strong engineering practices around coding, testing, quality, and reliability.
- Conduct detailed technical reviews and provide guidance to maintain code quality.
- Troubleshoot performance, scalability, and reliability issues in production AI systems.
- Champion continuous improvement, automation, and innovation within the team.
- Keep the team up-to-date with advances in LLMs, LLMOps, fine-tuning techniques, vector search, and generative AI.

Requirements:
- 8–10 years of experience in software development.
- More than 5 years of hands-on experience in AI/ML.
- More than 2 years in an engineering leadership role, preferably leading a cross-functional team.
- Hands-on experience building:
  - AI Agents / Agentic workflows
  - LLM pipelines (inference, orchestration, guardrails)
  - RAG systems (vector search, knowledge bases, multimodal RAG)
  - LLM fine-tuning (SFT, LoRA, instruction tuning)
  - LLMOps workflows (monitoring, evaluation, optimization, versioning)
- Strong understanding of ML algorithms, embeddings, transformers, vector semantics, and distributed systems.
- Experience with Vector Databases such as Elasticsearch, Weaviate, Pinecone, or Milvus.
- Proficiency with ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn).
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and MLOps tooling.

Good to have:
- Solid foundation in backend technologies such as Python, Java, Go, Node.js, and experience with Kafka.
- Knowledge of the Gaming industry or Customer Support domain.
- Familiarity with frontend frameworks (React, Angular, Vue.js).
- Exposure to functional programming (Clojure preferred; our team uses Clojure).
- Experience in startup/high-growth environments.
- Open-source contributions in AI/ML/LLM projects.
- Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).

Bonus Points:
- Experience building production-grade LLM-powered automation for customer support or gaming.
- Publications, presentations, or contributions related to LLMs, RAG, or AI Agents.

Benefits:
- Hybrid setup
- Worker's insurance
- Paid Time Offs
- Other employee benefits to be discussed by our Talent Acquisition team in India.

## Skills

### Required
- AI/ML
- LLM
- RAG
- Vector Databases
- ML frameworks
- Cloud platforms
- MLOps tooling

### Nice to have
- Python
- Java
- Go
- Node.js
- Kafka
- React
- Angular
- Vue.js
- Clojure
- Docker
- Kubernetes