National Lead - AI Unit

Location Name: Pune Corporate Office - Mantri

Job Purpose

We are looking for a leader who can build and run AI product Pods for Credit Risk, Fraud Risk Management, and collection & recovery. This role will power next-generation decisioning across lending lifecycle- understanding lifecycle- underwriting, portfolio monitoring, fraud controls, early warning, allocation strategy optimization, and recovery uplift – by delivering production-grade ML systems with measurable impact. This is highly cross-functional role requiring deep technical leadership, strong execution discipline, and hands-on experience operating large scale distributed machine learning frameworks. (Training + fine-tuning + serving) under BFSI governance, security, and model risk constraints.

Duties And Responsibilities

Own the AI Pod operating model across Credit Risk, Fraud/FRM, and collections/Recovery: outcomes,

roadmap, delivery cadence, and cross-team dependencies.

• Lead end-to-end model lifecycle: problem framing, feature strategy, training, evaluation, development,
  
  
  

monitoring, and continuous improvement with clear scorecards per use-case.

• Build large-scale ML systems: distributed training pipelines, feature stores, model registry, CI/CD for ML, and
  
  
  

scalable batch + near-real-time scoring services.

• Deliver Credit & Risk models: application/behavior risk models, limit assignment, early warning signals,
  
  
  

portfolio monitoring, and policy optimization.

• Deliver Frau & FRM systems: fraud propensity/risk scoring, anomaly detection, identity/device/channel
  
  
  

signals using Graph Machine Learning.

• Deliver collection & recovery optimization: roll-rate/cure/flow models, contactability, propensity-to-pay and
  
  
  

recovery forecasting.

• Define operating models: SLIs/SLOs, incident response, and stakeholder cadence.
• Hire, develop, and scale the team: drive standards for quality, safety, and reliability.
  
  
  

Basic Qualifications

Required Qualifications and Experience

• Bachelor’s/Master’s in CS/Math/Engineering (PhD preferred in Large scale Machine learning systems)
• 10+ years experience in Data Science /Applied ML/ ML Engineering with proven leadership delivering
  
  
  

production – grade ML system at scale.

• Demonstrated success shipping models with measurable business impact in credit risk, fraud/FRM, and /or
  
  
  

collection & recovery.

Required Skills & Competencies Core (must-have)

• Large-scale model training & Fine-tuning: experience with distributed training, efficient fine -tuning patterns, model versioning, reproducibility, and cost/performance trade-offs.
• ML evaluation rigor: calibration, stability/drift, bias/fairness checks, leakage prevention, robust back-testing, and champion-challenger frameworks.
• Production mindset: ability to translate business objectives into ML systems with strong monitoring, alerting, and operational playbooks. Engineering & Tooling
• Strong coding ability in Python (and Java/Scala as needed); ability to prototype rapidly and productize.
• Distributed systems knowledge: scaling, caching, sharding, HA, performance tuning for both training and serving.
• Experience with common stacks: feature stores, model registry, experiment tracking, vector/graph where relevant, stream/batch processing Kubernetes, CI/CD.
• Observability: logging/metrics/tracing, incident management, SLO-driven operations.
• Experience with data and compute stacks: Spark, Kafka/streaming, Lakehouse/warehouse, APIs/microservices. Governance, Security, and Compliance
• Designing for BFSI constraints: PII handling, policy enforcement, auditability, access controls.
• Risk-aware engineering mindset: safe tool execution, approval workflows, and secure-by-design, approval workflows, and secure by design patterns. Leadership Behaviors
• High ownership, structured thinking, and ability to drive clarity in ambiguous environments.
• Strong program management

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