Data and Gen AI Practice Lead

Role summary

Merke is soliciting applications for the position of a leader for out Data & GenAI practice focused on front-end functions—sales, marketing, and growth. You will be the player-coach who defines the strategy, hires and leads a multi-disciplinary team, builds accelerators / IP, shapes solutions and POCs, drives GTM with partners, and ensures production-grade delivery for enterprise clients.

What you’ll do

Practice leadership & strategy

Define the practice vision, service catalog, and roadmap across : LLM apps / copilots / agents, RAG over marketing & sales knowledge, decisioning / propensity, recommendations, experimentation & uplift modeling, identity & consent-aware activation.

Publish reference architectures for front-office stacks (CDP / CRM ↔ GenAI services ↔ channels) and delivery playbooks (SOW templates, estimations, QA / eval harnesses, runbooks).

Solutioning & POCs (front-office)

Lead discovery and solution design with commercial guardrails (CAC / LTV, conversion, AOV, churn, media ROI etc).

Startup up a

Solutions Lab

for rapid POCs that graduate to production (clear success metrics, latency / SLOs, cost-per-request, safety / guardrails).

Own build vs. buy decisions across hyperscalers and ISVs

GTM, partnerships & revenue

Package offerings / accelerators, create demos and case studies; enable Sales with qualification guides and ROI calculators.

Co-sell with cloud / ISV partners; manage partner tiers / MDF; shape and lead proposals / RFPs with clear commercials (T&M / fixed / managed).

Delivery & governance

Oversee end-to-end delivery from discovery → design → build → deploy → operate; enforce SLAs / SLOs, change control, and cost governance.

Establish

MLOps / LLMOps : CI / CD for data / models / prompts, vector index pipelines, eval harnesses (factuality, toxicity, bias), telemetry, rollback.

Implement privacy, security, and Responsible AI : consent handling, PII redaction, audit trails; align with GDPR / DPDP / PCI / RBI where applicable.

People leadership

Hire and mentor Solution Architects, GenAI / ML Engineers, Retrieval / Prompt / Eval Engineers, Data Engineers (activation-oriented), and Engagement Managers.

Build a hands-on, outcome-driven culture; review designs, unblock delivery, and raise the technical bar.

Minimum qualifications

12+ years in data / ML / AI with 5+ years leading delivery / consulting / tech teams; proven practice / P&L ownership.

Demonstrated wins delivering

front-office

AI (sales / marketing / growth) in BFSI, Auto, or Retail / E-com is a good to have

Architecture depth across :

GenAI / LLM apps :

RAG, tool-use / agents, prompt / retrieval optimization, eval / guardrails; vector DBs (pgvector / FAISS / Pinecone, etc.); orchestration (LangChain / LlamaIndex or equivalent).

Activation stack :

CDPs (Salesforce Data Cloud / Adobe RTCDP / Treasure Data), CRMs (Salesforce / MS Dynamics), MAPs (SFMC / Adobe / Braze), ad APIs (Google / Meta), MMPs.

Data / infra :

Databricks / Spark, Snowflake / BigQuery, Kafka / Kinesis, dbt; microservices, K8s / containers, CI / CD, secrets / KMS.

Presales excellence : discovery, solution shaping, SOWs / pricing, stakeholder management, and C-suite communication.