Lead Data Scientist - AI/ML - FinTech - IIT/NIT/BITS

Job Description:

We're hiring a Lead Data Scientist / AI/ML Engineer for a Fintech Company.

Experience: 10-12 yrs

Location: Pune

Salary Budget: 45-60 LPA

Roles & Responsibilities:

- Lead AI Product Pods across Credit Risk, Fraud, and Collections functions.

- Build and deploy production-scale Machine Learning systems for lending lifecycle decisioning.

- Own complete ML lifecycle including feature engineering, model training, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement.

- Design scalable distributed ML infrastructure, feature stores, model registries, and MLOps pipelines.

- Develop AI solutions for underwriting, portfolio risk monitoring, fraud detection, anomaly detection, and recovery optimization.

- Drive model governance, monitoring, explainability, and compliance within BFSI regulatory standards.

- Collaborate with Product, Risk, Engineering, Data, and Business teams to deliver AI-driven business outcomes.

- Define AI platform architecture, operational excellence, SLAs, and incident management practices.

- Build, mentor, and scale high-performing AI Engineering and Data Science teams.

Ideal Candidate:

- Must have 10+ years of experience in Data Science, AI/ML or AI Engineering with hands-on experience building production-grade ML systems.

- Must have hands-on experience building AI/ML solutions for Credit Risk, Fraud Risk Management (FRM), Collections & Recovery, with proven delivery of business-impacting AI/ML solutions.

- Candidate's current designation must be Lead or above.

- Must have strong experience designing and deploying large-scale distributed Machine Learning systems, including model training, fine-tuning, inference, scalable serving, and production deployment.

- Strong programming experience in Python, along with exposure to Spark, Kafka, Kubernetes, APIs/Microservices, CI/CD, Feature Store, Model Registry, and Distributed Computing.

- Experience designing and deploying Credit Risk Models, Fraud Detection Models, Graph ML, Early Warning Systems, Portfolio Monitoring, Collections Optimization, Propensity Models, and Recovery Forecasting.

- Proven experience leading AI/ML teams, owning end-to-end delivery, mentoring engineers, driving cross-functional execution, and managing production AI platforms.

- Must have experience working under BFSI governance, including PII handling, auditability, model governance, compliance, secure-by-design architecture, approval workflows, and model risk management practices.

- Candidate should be from Tier 1 institutions to be considered for this position.

- Candidates currently working as Lead / Principal / Engineering Manager / Associate Director / Director in reputed Product, FinTech, Banking, NBFC, or Global Capability Centers will be preferred.

- Indian professionals currently working overseas (NRI) who are planning to relocate and permanently settle in India are encouraged to apply.

- Experience building enterprise AI platforms using Graph ML, Vector Databases, LLM-enabled decisioning, distributed training frameworks, and large-scale AI infrastructure.

- Looking for immediate joiners or those who can join within a max 30 days notice period.