Founding Engineer - Machine Learning
About this role
Join Deccan AI as a Founding ML Engineer to build and scale core machine learning systems from the ground up alongside the founding team. You will bridge research and engineering to design, train, and ship production-grade models for top AI frontier labs while shaping the company's technical culture and infrastructure. This is a high-ownership role where your work directly establishes the foundation for how Deccan AI delivers measurable ML impact.
What youll do
- Build and optimize end-to-end ML pipelines, from data ingestion to deployment.
- Implement and fine-tune LLMs, embeddings, and generative models for real-world applications.
- Develop efficient training and inference systems leveraging distributed compute.
- Partner with the data and product teams to translate ideas into measurable ML impact.
- Contribute to model monitoring, evaluation, and continual learning frameworks.
- Establish best practices in model versioning, reproducibility, and scalability.
What Deccan AI is looking for
- 3-10 years of experience as an ML Engineer, Applied Scientist, or Research Engineer.
- Proficiency in Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX.
- Strong grasp of ML fundamentals, including data preprocessing, feature engineering, model training, and optimization.
- Experience with distributed systems, cloud ML infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), and MLOps tools such as Weights & Biases or MLflow.
- Comfort working with large datasets and high-throughput systems.
- Bias for action, ability to work autonomously, and eagerness to build something from scratch.
Company at a glance
Deccan AI is a Bay Area–based model training and evaluation startup founded by IIT Bombay, IIM Ahmedabad, and Google alumni; it collaborates with Google DeepMind and Snowflake and is backed by Prosus Ventures, with an India delivery office in Hyderabad.
What happens next
Skip the application pile. I get you in front of the people who decide.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I pitch you to the company
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
When the company wants to meet, I get the call on your calendar. You just show up.
Culture & values
The company collaborates with marketing and product teams to translate growth goals into measurable ML solutions.
The role emphasizes blending data science, machine learning, and growth strategy to drive user acquisition and engagement.
The company experiments with LLMs, recommendation systems, and generative AI for content and outreach.
They establish data-driven frameworks for channel optimization and ROI tracking.
Most roles are on-site in Bay Area or Hyderabad, indicating an in-person work preference.
The environment focuses on automating demand generation workflows and building data pipelines for behavioral analytics, targeting, and experimentation.
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