Lead AI Engineer - "Local-first LLMs, real production ownership" - Pune

We're building the ML and agentic AI layer that decides what deserves an analyst's attention — and we need a player-coach to lead it.This isn't a management-only seat. You'll set technical direction for a team of AI/ML engineers while staying hands-on with the hardest problems yourself — spanning classical ML (classification, ranking, clustering, anomaly detection) and LLM-driven agentic reasoning on top of it.You'll own:🔹 The ML layer — alert classification, case prioritization, behavioral baselining, feature engineering over security telemetry🔹 Agentic workflows — retrieval-grounded investigation, tool use, structured output🔹 Model decisions — what runs where, local/self-hosted deployment for private-cloud & sovereign customers, inference cost/latency/quality at scale🔹 Evaluation & trust — harnesses, drift detection, guardrails, agent autonomy boundariesWhat you bring:✅ 8+ years in ML/applied AI/data science, 4+ owning production systems✅ 2+ years leading or tech-leading an AI/ML team, still hands-on✅ Proven ownership of ML + agentic AI in production (not just prototypes)✅ Strong RAG, agent orchestration, prompt engineering, fine-tuning✅ Hands-on with vLLM/TGI/Ollama — quantization, GPU sizing, throughput/cost trade-offs✅ Python (PyTorch/TensorFlow/scikit-learn), SQL, MLOps on AWS/GCP/Azure with Docker/K8sBonus: UEBA, graph analytics, MITRE ATT&CK/ATLAS familiarity, publications or open-source contributions.If you've shipped both the "narrow the signal" and "reason over it" halves of this problem — and want real ownership over which — let's talk. Write to rukmini@careerxperts.com