A4I Lab (IIIT-B × Microsoft)

Organization: A4I Lab (IIIT-B × Microsoft)
Type: Contract (through March 2027, extendable)
Experience: 6 to 8 years
AI Innovation and Inclusion Initiative (A4I) is a partnership between Microsoft and IIIT-B, collaborating with non-profit partners to harness AI for solving real-world challenges in education, healthcare, accessibility, and agriculture. A4I evolves innovations into open-source Digital Public Goods (DPGs) that are deployable at scale, fostering a strong AI innovation ecosystem for social impact.
A4I Lab is seeking an experienced Senior AI Engineer to help design and scale agentic systems to drive meaningful public and social impact. This role is suited to someone who combines strong architectural judgment with hands-on technical depth and is comfortable building for real-world operating conditions, such as multilingual use cases, constrained environments, and diverse stakeholder needs.
You will shape production-ready AI platforms and multi-agent workflows that can serve high-volume, high-value use cases across sectors such as education, healthcare, agriculture, and accessibility. The role offers the opportunity to guide architecture from early design through deployment, while helping create scalable and reusable Digital Public Goods.
Lead the Architecture of Agentic AI Systems: Design end-to-end agentic AI architectures that move from prototype to production, with a strong focus on reliability, scalability, and practical deployment. Build Intelligent, Integrated AI Platforms: Shape AI platforms that bring together LLMs, retrieval systems, structured and unstructured data, and multi-modal inputs such as speech, documents, and vision. You will guide the design of RAG pipelines, knowledge layers, model integration patterns, and evaluation approaches that improve system quality in meaningful ways.
Drive Production Readiness and Platform Maturity: Define architectural standards for deployment, monitoring, versioning, and safe rollout across cloud-based AI systems. You will help establish sound engineering and MLOps practices so that new capabilities can move into production with consistency, traceability, and operational confidence.
You will mentor team members, support strong technical documentation, and help build reusable open-source assets that strengthen A4I's Digital Public Goods approach.
The work focuses on production-oriented AI systems and reusable platforms that create clear social value.
You will work across multiple stakeholders and use cases, while remaining closely connected to delivery and implementation.
Production AI Architecture: Demonstrated experience designing and shipping production-grade AI systems, including at least one end-to-end agentic or LLM-powered workload used by real users. Hands-on experience with one or more agent orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph, LlamaIndex, n8n, or comparable tools. LLM, Retrieval, and Knowledge Systems: Strong understanding of LLM application design, including RAG architectures, vector retrieval, embeddings, context management, and evaluation. You should be able to make sound design choices around retrieval quality, grounding, and domain-specific performance.
Cloud and Platform Engineering: Good experience working with cloud platforms and production deployment patterns, including containerization, CI/CD, model lifecycle practices, and operational monitoring. Comfort with Azure is especially valuable, though experience across AWS or GCP is also relevant.
Systems Thinking at Scale: Ability to design systems for meaningful scale, balancing performance, cost, resilience, and usability under real-world constraints. This includes an appreciation of how architecture decisions affect maintainability, team velocity, and long-term platform evolution.
Strong Python Engineering: Fluency in Python for production environments, with a focus on clean, testable, maintainable code. You should be able to communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders and help move teams toward sound implementation choices.
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, or equivalent demonstrated expertise.

6 to 8 years of experience designing and building software systems, including at least 2 years focused on production AI or ML applications.
Demonstrated experience in architecting and deploying large-scale AI platforms.
Experience adapting smaller or open models such as Llama, Mistral, or Phi for domain-specific tasks, including PEFT, LoRA, or instruction tuning.

Hands-on exposure to VLMs, speech models, and multilingual or Indic-language pipelines.
Familiarity with both Azure OpenAI services and open-source deployment options such as Ollama, vLLM, or Hugging Face.
Experience with AI evaluation frameworks such as RAGAS, LangSmith, or custom evaluation approaches.
Contributions to open-source AI projects, technical publications, or applied ML work.
Application for Senior AI Engineer
A4I Lab is committed to building AI systems that serve everyone.

Senior Python - AI Developer

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