Head - AI Center of Excellence

This is with one of our clients. They are the leading technology supplier for the beverage industry. From helping distributors improve their warehouse, delivery, and sales operations, to empowering suppliers to know where their products are and how they are selling, they have the technology and expertise to help the business thrive.

Job Role: AI Center of Excellence (CoE) Lead

Job Location: Mumbai

Work Model: 4 days a week in office

Summary:

We are seeking an experienced AI CoE Lead to build, scale, and run an enterprise-grade AI Center of Excellence. This is a hands-on leadership role where the individual will actively design, develop, and deploy AI/ML solutions while also shaping strategy, governance, and team capability. The role requires deep technical expertise combined with the ability to translate business problems into scalable AI solutions.

Key Responsibilities:

Technical & Hands-on Leadership:

• Lead end-to-end design, development, and deployment of AI/ML solutions across use cases (NLP, CV, predictive analytics, GenAI, recommendation systems).
• Be hands-on with model development, experimentation, training, evaluation, and optimization.
• Architect scalable AI platforms and pipelines (data ingestion, feature engineering, model lifecycle management, MLOps).
• Drive adoption of GenAI/LLMs (prompt engineering, fine-tuning, RAG architectures, AI agents).

CoE Setup & Governance

• Establish the AI CoE operating model, standards, and best practices.
• Define AI governance, model risk management, ethics, security, and compliance frameworks.
• Create reusable accelerators, frameworks, and reference architectures.

Business & Stakeholder Collaboration

• Partner with business leaders, product teams, and engineering to identify high-impact AI use cases.
• Translate business problems into AI roadmaps with clear ROI and measurable outcomes.
• Act as a thought leader and advisor on AI strategy across the organization.

Team & Capability Building

• Build, mentor, and scale a high-performing team of data scientists, ML engineers, and AI engineers.
• Review code, models, and solution design to ensure quality and scalability.
• Upskill teams and drive an AI-first culture across the organization.

Required Skills & Experience

• 12–15 years of overall experience, with at least 7–10 years in AI/ML, data science, or advanced analytics roles.
• Proven experience setting up or leading an AI CoE or large-scale AI programs.
• Strong track record of delivering production-grade AI solutions.

Technical Skills (Must-Have)

• Strong hands-on expertise in Python, ML frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch, Scikit-learn).
• Deep understanding of ML algorithms, deep learning, NLP, and generative AI.
• Experience with LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, open-source models), fine-tuning, and RAG.
• Solid experience in MLOps, CI/CD for ML, model monitoring, and lifecycle management.
• Strong understanding of data engineering concepts, cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP), and scalable architectures.