Head of AI

Head of AI

Location : Bangalore or Hyderabad (India)

Type : Full-Time | Immediate Joining Preferred

CTC : Competitive (Top Percentile)

About YAL.ai

YAL.Ai (Your Alternative Life) is a revolutionary end-to-end communication and discovery platform that redefines how people connect, interact, and collaborate. Powered by advanced AI, YAL.ai offers secure, AI-driven instant chats, group discussions, dynamic communities, and seamless VoIP calls, delivering a comprehensive and engaging communication experience.

Built on a robust Zero Trust Architecture, YAL.ai ensures maximum security by verifying every interaction and safeguarding user data at all levels. Our platform incorporates on-device AI models for enhanced privacy, multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR), personalized recommendations, fraud detection, and comprehensive multilingual support.

YAL.Ai embodies the essence of trust and innovation with its tagline, "Where AI Meets Integrity." Users can build meaningful connections, foster vibrant communities, and explore limitless opportunities in a secure, privacy-centric digital environment. YAL.ai isn't just a platform—it's your alternative life, where communication and discovery are smarter, safer, and more impactful.

Role Overview

We are seeking a Head of AI, a visionary leader and highly research-oriented expert who can define and drive our AI strategy, guide world-class AI research and development, and mentor high-performing engineering teams.

This role is for someone passionate about innovation, scalability, and impact, who can own the AI roadmap, accelerate research-to-production cycles, and ensure our AI solutions operate at the highest levels of scientific and technical excellence. You will be responsible for shaping the future of AI at YAL.ai and taking our team to new heights of technical capability and research leadership.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Leadership

• Define and own the AI vision and long-term roadmap.
• Build a culture of innovation and scientific rigor in the AI team.

Research & Innovation

• Establish and drive cutting-edge research initiatives in speech AI, NLP, fraud detection, and recommendation systems.
• Stay ahead of emerging AI advancements and ensure their strategic adoption.

System Architecture & Deployment

• Architect highly scalable, low-latency AI pipelines for mobile, edge, and cloud environments.
• Drive AI model optimization for on-device inference (TFLite, ONNX, CoreML).

Team & Collaboration

• Mentor and grow a team of researchers and engineers.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, backend, and MLOps teams.

Representation & Outreach

• Represent YAL.ai in conferences, research publications, and industry collaborations.

Required Technical Skills

Speech AI 

• Experience with speech AI/ASR models like Whisper, wav2vec2, DeepSpeech, Kaldi, Silero, including fine-tuning for Indian languages.
• Knowledge of telecom metadata analytics and VoIP protocols (SIP, RTP).
• Experience detecting audio tampering, speaker changes, and spoofing in voice signals.

Natural Language Processing

• Expertise in transformer-based architectures (Encoder, Decoder) and NLP tasks such as fraud detection, intent classification, entity recognition, and masked text decoding.
• Ability to build end-to-end NLP pipelines for real-time, low-latency text processing.
• Experience with multilingual and code-mixed NLP (e.g., Hinglish, Indic languages).

Fraud Detection & Trust AI

• Experience building fraud/ spam/phishing detection, and trust & safety NLP solutions.
• Familiarity with social engineering, phishing, and microtext manipulation detection.

Recommendation & Discovery Systems

• Strong background in embedding-based similarity, graph-based recommendation (Node2Vec, DeepWalk), and hybrid dense + sparse retrieval.
• Hands-on experience with vector search (FAISS, Annoy, HNSW) and ranking strategies.
• Experience with clustering (KMeans, HDBSCAN), dimensionality reduction (UMAP, PCA), and semantic search.

Model Optimization & Edge AI

• Proficiency in on-device inference, quantization (QAT/PTQ), pruning, distillation, and exporting models to ONNX/TFLite/CoreML/NNAPI.
• Experience building mobile-first AI solutions optimized for low-latency and high-throughput.

Core Technical Skills

• Excellent command of Python, PyTorch/TensorFlow, and text processing libraries.
• Strong understanding of data structures for AI pipelines and real-time deployment stacks.
• Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, and GCP/AWS for scalable AI deployments.

Qualifications

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, Mathematics, or any other related technical field.
• Specialization or thesis work in speech processing, NLP, fraud detection, or recommendation systems preferred.
• Strong portfolio of real-world AI applications, open-source contributions, or peer-reviewed publications.

Experience

• 10+ years in AI/ML research & development, with 5+ years in leadership roles.
• Hands-on experience in NLP, speech AI, fraud detection, and recommendation systems.
• Proven track record of building production-ready AI pipelines for edge, and cloud.
• Experience leading research-driven AI teams and delivering scalable, real-time AI solutions.

Bonus if You Have

• Contributions to open-source frameworks (e.g., HuggingFace, Whisper, wav2vec2).
• Experience with CoreML, NNAPI, or mobile SDK ML inference stacks.
• Participation in Kaggle NLP/Speech competitions or published research in ACL/EMNLP/RecSys.
• Hands-on work in privacy-preserving AI, adversarial robustness, or federated learning.

How to Apply

Send your CV, portfolio, and research/publication links to

Subject: (Head of AI | Your Name)