Deputy National Lead

Job Purpose
To lead the Search AI capability by developing state-of-the-art search systems and machine learning models, enabling scalable, accurate, and intelligent search experiences across BFL businesses. The role contributes directly to enhancing customer experience, driving efficiency, and building AI-based horizontal capabilities for search, ranking, and personalization.Duties and Responsibilities

• Lead a team of search engineers to design, build, and optimize horizontal search systems.

• Develop and prototype algorithms to improve indexing, query relevance, and search performance.

• Build and manage taxonomy, thesaurus, ontology, and metadata models to improve search accuracy.

• Partner with business stakeholders across Loans, Insurance, and Investments to deliver AI-enabled search solutions.

• Analyze customer behavior and website metrics to refine models and improve search outcomes.

• Drive cross-functional initiatives, working with engineers, designers, and product teams to deliver end-to-end solutions.

• Build production-grade ML systems for ranking, personalization, and recommendation engines.

• Collaborate with vendors/partners on capability development and proof-of-concepts.

• Implement best practices for software engineering including CI/CD, testing, release, and operations.

• Stay updated on academic and industry developments in AI/ML and design competitive services for next-gen products.Key Decisions / Dimensions

• Strategic decisions on design, architecture, and optimization of search systems.

• Prioritization of AI/ML projects and resource allocation across initiatives.

• Technology stack, frameworks, and model selection for AI-driven search.

• Approaches to improve customer search experience using taxonomy, NLP, and ML models.

• Team management decisions on mentoring, allocation, and performance improvement.Major Challenges

• Balancing multiple stakeholders' needs while ensuring scalability and robustness of AI solutions.

• Managing competing priorities, tight deadlines, and production-grade deployments.

• Staying ahead of emerging technologies in search, ML, NLP, and LLMs while ensuring practical adoption.

• Building state-of-the-art ML/AI models that can serve high-volume production traffic reliably.

• Ensuring high system uptime and seamless customer search experience across platforms.Required Qualifications and Experience
Educational Qualifications:

• PhD/MTech/BE/BTech/MSc in Computer Science, Mathematics, Operations Research, Statistics, or related quantitative fields.
Work Experience:

• 10+ years in Search, Information Retrieval, NLP, Machine Learning, and Predictive Analytics solutions.

• Proven record of delivering ML/AI-based products at production scale.

• Experience leading teams and mentoring in AI/ML fields.
Mandatory Skills:

• Expertise in Search platforms: Data connectors, indexing, faceted search, query expansion, NLP-driven search, image/voice/visual search.

• Strong coding skills in Python, Java, Scala.

• Experience with Hadoop, Spark, Large Scale ML algorithms.

• Hands-on with ML/DL frameworks: TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras, scikit-learn, Caffe, Theano.

• RESTful API, web services, integration with SQL/NoSQL databases (Cosmos DB, Cassandra, MongoDB).

• Knowledge of DevOps pipelines (Azure DevOps), CI/CD tools (Eclipse, Git, Jenkins, JFrog).

• Strong understanding of OOP, Linux environments, Agile practices.
Preferred Skills (Nice to Have):

• Experience with Elasticsearch/Solr, Lucene-based engines.

• Experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes) and distributed systems.

• Knowledge of modern front-end technologies (React/Angular, HTML5, CSS3).

• Publications/patents in AI/ML/NLP.

• Hands-on coding and ability to develop prototypes rapidly.

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