TL;DR
Our client, an enterprise AI company in Bengaluru, is hiring a Head of AI to lead applied AI across its product. This is a production role: the models this person is responsible for run in front of paying customers, and the measure is what they do in the product rather than what they score on a benchmark.
The client is confidential at this stage. We will tell you who it is before your profile goes anywhere.
What the role owns
The applied AI function and its output in the product. That covers model selection and evaluation, the systems around the models that make them reliable enough to sell, and the team that builds both.
The hard part of this role is not modelling. It is everything between a model that works in a notebook and a feature an enterprise customer will depend on: evaluation that catches regressions, retrieval that returns the right context, latency and cost that make the unit economics work, and failure behaviour that degrades sensibly rather than confidently inventing things.
What the client is looking for
Someone who has shipped AI into production at enterprise scale and can talk concretely about what broke. The strongest candidates describe evaluation harnesses they built, a regression they caught before customers did, or a case where they chose a smaller model and explain the reasoning.
Team leadership is part of it. The function is small now and expected to grow, so the hire needs to be close enough to the work to set technical direction while actually hiring and developing people.
Research credentials are welcome but not the point. A strong publication record with no production ownership is not a fit for this particular seat, and the client is explicit about that.
Process
A conversation with us, then the client's founding team, then a technical session on a real problem from their domain.
Related reading
Our AI, deep tech and quantum practice covers how these searches run, and agentic AI in trading is a worked example of where applied AI meets production constraints.
Interested in this role?
Apply once, to us. We confirm the client with you before anything is submitted. Because of application volume, only shortlisted candidates are contacted.