Senior Scientific Officer

Senior Scientific Officer – MLOps and DevOps ICRISAT seeks applications from dynamic Indian nationals as Senior Scientific Officer – MLOps and DevOps in the Digital Agriculture team under the Global Research Program Resilient Farm & Food Systems. The incumbent would need to take care of support activities of the Global Research Program on Resilient Farm and Food Systems (GRP-RF&FS). This position will be based at ICRISAT’s Headquarters in Patancheru, Hyderabad, Telangana, India. The Digital Agriculture team is actively developing scalable digital platforms and AI/ML-based tools for agricultural decision support. This position will play a critical role in operationalizing machine learning models, automating deployment pipelines, and ensuring robust infrastructure for data-driven agricultural solutions. ICRISAT is a non-profit, non-political organization that conducts agricultural research for development in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa with a wide array of partners throughout the world. Covering 6.5 million square kilometers of land in 55 countries, the semi- arid or dryland tropics has over 2 billion people and 644 million of these are the poorest of the poor. ICRISAT and its partners help empower these disadvantaged populations to overcome poverty, hunger and a degraded environment through better agricultural production systems. ICRISAT is headquartered at Patancheru near Hyderabad, India, with two regional hubs and eight country offices in sub-Saharan Africa. ICRISAT envisions a prosperous, food-secure and resilient dryland tropics. Its mission is to reduce poverty, hunger, malnutrition and environmental degradation in the dryland tropics. ICRISAT conducts research on its mandate crops of chickpea, pigeonpea, groundnut, sorghum, pearl millet and finger millet in the arid and semi-arid tropics. The Institute focuses its work on the drylands and in protecting the environment. Tropical dryland areas are usually seen as resource-poor and perennially beset by shocks such as drought, thereby trapping dryland communities in poverty and hunger and making them dependent on external aid. Please visit - Responsibilities: Design and implement MLOps/DevOps pipelines for scalable deployment of AI/ML models. Collaborate with data scientists and software engineers to integrate models into production environments. Manage cloud infrastructure (Azure, AWS, GCP) for hosting applications and data services. Automate CI/CD workflows for model training, testing, and deployment. Monitor model performance and ensure version control, reproducibility, and rollback mechanisms. Develop containerized applications using Docker and orchestration using Kubernetes. Ensure data security, compliance, and efficient data flow across systems. Support development of APIs and microservices for digital agriculture platforms. Maintain documentation and provide technical support to research teams.  Required Skills and Qualifications: Master’s degree in computer applications, Computer Science, Information Technology, or any related fields. Relevant experience of at least 2-5 years in MLOps/DevOps roles, preferably in research or data-intensive environments is mandatory Proficiency in Python and scripting for automation. Familiarity with ML frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch, Scikit-learn) and model lifecycle management. Understanding of CI/CD tools (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI). Knowledge of containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes). Familiarity with cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP) and infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Ansible). Understanding of data versioning tools (DVC, MLflow) and monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana). Excellent problem-solving, communication, and documentation skills. General: This is a contractual role for a period of 24 months (2 years), renewable based on the performance of the incumbent and the institute’s continuing need for the position.