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.