AI Lead Architect

Job Description:

Key Responsibilities

• Solution Engineering & Technical Execution:

o Lead the hands-on engineering for end-to-end AI solutions across Deep Learning,

GenAI, Agentic AI, and multimodal use cases.

o Apply rigorous "fail fast" logic to all AI project management. Quickly identify,

evaluate, and disqualify unviable AI use cases based on technical feasibility, effort,

cost, and risk early in the cycle.

o Perform explicit trade-off analysis on model class (frontier vs. SLM vs. fine-tuned),

retrieval design, memory optimization, and orchestration. 

o Lead solutioning, support architecture for end-to-end AI solutions across GenAI,

Agentic AI, multimodal, and applied ML use cases, with explicit trade-off analysis

on model class (frontier vs. SLM vs. fine-tuned), retrieval design, memory, and

orchestration.

o Own the practice's reference architectures and solution design patterns for

multimodal agentic systems, including planning, tool use, memory, grounding, and

inter-agent communication (MCP, A2A).

o Conduct solution design reviews across concurrent client engagements; facilitate

subjective technical decisions and enable delivery excellence.

• Multimodal Agentic Systems & SLM Design:

o Design and lead the build of multi-agent systems with reasoning, planning, tool

use, persistent memory, and grounded retrieval.

o Lead multimodal system design and solutions across text, vision, speech, and

structured data, including ingestion, representation, and downstream agent

reasoning. 

o Establish patterns for SLM design and adoption — distillation, fine-tuning,

quantization, and routing — to meet enterprise constraints on cost, latency, data

residency, and on-prem/edge deployment

o Define hybrid retrieval and knowledge architectures spanning vector, graph (KG),

and NoSQL stores; lead KG-assisted retrieval, entity linking, and structured

grounding.

• Eval, Guardrails & Production Quality:

o Establish evaluation as a first-class discipline: design eval frameworks, golden

datasets, regression suites, automated and human-in-the-loop evals, and

observability for agentic and generative systems. 

o Define and enforce safety, guardrail, and hallucination-control standards across

the practice; lead red-teaming and adversarial testing for high-stakes

deployments.

o Set the bar for production readiness—reliability, latency, cost, monitoring, drift

detection, and incident response—for AI systems in regulated, enterprise-grade

environments.

o Lead GPU/accelerator ops, model serving, and lifecycle automation for

deployment across cloud hyper-scalers, on-prem, and edge.

• Technical Leadership & Capability Pillars:

o Act as a technical sentinel for the AI practice, mentoring engineers through

rigorous code and architecture reviews to ensure permanent capability building

rather than temporary crisis management.

o Establish and enforce AI in SDLC frameworks on delivery projects.

• Cross-functional Leadership & Delivery

o Engage with client and stakeholder leadership on architecture, feasibility, and risk;

communicate technical direction clearly to non-technical audiences.

o Support pre-sales and solutioning for new GenAI and Agentic AI opportunities,

including effort estimation, architectural framing, and capability storytelling.

Must Have

Technical Skills

• Deep Learning & Machine Learning: Strong hands-on experience with neural networks, Transformers, predictive modeling, embeddings, and vector search.
• Generative AI: Hands-on experience with LLMs/SLMs, RAG/Agentic RAG, agents, prompt engineering, grounding, multimodal architectures, and production GenAI solutions.
• Fine-tuning: Practical experience with techniques such as SFT, LoRA/QLoRA, RLHF/RLAIF, distillation, and/or quantization.
• Agentic AI: Hands-on experience with multi-agent orchestration, planning, tool use, memory, and agentic workflows. Experience with frameworks such as LangGraph, LlamaIndex, or AutoGen.
• Programming & Engineering: Advanced Python, SQL, strong API/backend engineering experience using FastAPI, Flask, Django, or equivalent frameworks.
• Production Engineering: Proven experience designing, developing, testing, and deploying AI/ML solutions in enterprise production environments.
• Cloud: Strong hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform — AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Data/Storage: Experience with databases and data platforms such as MongoDB, NoSQL, vector databases, graph databases, or equivalent.
• Experience: Minimum 8 years of total hands-on software development/engineering experience.
• AI Experience: Minimum 3+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying Deep Learning/AI systems in production.
• GenAI/Agentic AI: Demonstrable hands-on experience beyond basic API integrations or simple RAG implementations, such as multi-agent systems, custom fine-tuning, advanced RAG, or SLM deployments.
• Work Location: Willingness to work from the Pune office at least 3 days per week.

Good to have:

Experience with commerce cloud ecosystems (Salesforce and

Adobe).

Attitude & Mindset

• Equipped with a builder's hands and a highly pragmatic approach to enterprise AI.

• Prioritizes technical validation, pragmatic domain expertise, and rigorous testing over

"AI hype."

• Open and flexible toward a hybrid work structure with no less than 3 days work from

the office in Pune, ensuring regular connection and cross-project knowledge.

Location:

Pune

Brand:

Merkle

Time Type:

Full time

Contract Type:

Permanent