About the role :
Ekip IT is seeking a Staff AI Engineer who will play a critical leadership role in shaping the architecture and delivery of AI-powered systems across the organization. Youll operate at the intersection of backend engineering and applied machine learningdesigning resilient infrastructure, deploying cutting-edge models, and mentoring engineers across teams. This role goes beyond building software : its about setting strategy, elevating engineering standards, and turning AI innovation into scalable, real-world will :
- Own the architecture and implementation of distributed, high-scale backend systems and APIs that serve machine learning models in production.
- Lead technical design for AI integration across product lines, enabling real-time and batch inference workflows using LLMs, transformers, and classification models.
- Drive the fine-tuning and deployment of pre-trained models (e.g., from Hugging Face or OpenAI) for mission-critical business use cases in domains such as healthcare, finance, or
operations.
Integrate external AI services where appropriate and evaluate trade-offs for build vs. buy decisions.Define and evolve platform-wide standards for backend engineering, MLOps, model governance, and observability.Mentor and support senior and mid-level engineers, both within your team and across functions, to elevate system design and code quality.Collaborate with cross-functional leaders in product, ML research, data engineering, and DevOps to align technical initiatives with business goals.Influence AI strategy and roadmap, evaluating emerging technologies and frameworks for future adoption.Lead root-cause analyses and performance tuning to ensure systems remain reliable, efficient, and are :A senior technical leader with a demonstrated ability to architect, build, and scale AI-backed systems in production environments.Comfortable operating across layers - from backend API services to AI Services and ML model lifecycle management - while driving architectural clarity and system-level thinking.Experienced in bridging the gap between research and production, with a strong focus onreliability, maintainability, and business outcomes.
Skilled at leading cross-team initiatives, guiding technical direction, and fostering a high-trust engineering culture.Able to influence without authority, collaborating across teams to align on complex technical trade-offs.Deeply invested in engineering excellence, with a strong bias toward automation,observability, and have :
8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 2+ years at the Staff Engineer level or equivalent4+ years of experience with backend development in TypeScript, Node.js, and SQL-based RDBMS (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL)1+ years deploying ML / AI models to production, with hands-on experience fine-tuning LLMs or transformer-based modelsDeep understanding of system architecture, cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP), and scalable API designStrong experience with MLOps tooling (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes, Airflow, MLflow) and model deployment practicesProven leadership in setting technical direction, mentoring engineers, and driving cross-team projects to completionBachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical fieldRole : Staff AI Engineer
Location : Hyderabad
(ref : hirist.tech)