Senior Software Engineer - AI

Designation - Senior Software Engineer - AI

Business Unit - Higher Education Department - Technology

Experience Range - 4-5 years Location - Bengaluru, Karnataka

About upGrad: upGrad is one of India’s leading higher edtech platforms, servi

ng millions of learners across 100+ countr ies with strong university and industry partnerships. With a mission to enable career success through outcome-driven learning, upGrad is now building its next growth engine focused on undergraduate learners across India.

About the Role: We are looking for

a Senior Software Engineer – AI who is passionate about building intelligent systems that solve real-world problems. You’ll work at the intersection

of machine learn in

g, large language models (LL Ms), a

nd backend engineer ing, turning research into production-ready systems. This is a hands-on engineering role with a strong emphasis

on scalable AI integra ti

on, prompt enginee ri

ng, RAG (retrieval-augmented generat ion), and build

ing intelligent APIs and microservices. What You'll Do

• Design and build AI-powered applications u

sing LLMs (OpenAI, LLaMA, Mistral, et

c.), vector databases, and embedding models

• Build scalable backend systems and APIs (Python, FastAPI, Node.js, etc.) to serve AI features in production.
• Develop retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and manage unstructured knowledge bases (PDFs, docs, audio).
• Optimize inference pipelines for low latency and cost (e.g., with Ollama, vLLM, or LangChain).
• Work with tools

like Wh is

per, Huggin gFace,

and Pinecone/ChromaDB/Weaviate

• Write clean, modular code and lead by example in engineering excellence.
• Collaborate closely with product, design, and ML teams to rapidly prototype and ship feaures.

Must-Have Skills:

• 4+ years of software engineering experience (Python preferred).
• Hands-on experience

wit h

LLMs, generat i

ve AI, or custom ML workflows.

• Strong understandi

ng of

NLP, embeddings, and vector search.

• Experience

with FastAPI / Flask / Django and REST APIs.

• Solid grounding in

Docker, Git, and CI/CD pipelines.

• Comfortable with cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure) and containerized deployments.
• Strong debugging, performance tuning, and system design skills.

Good to Have:

• Experience with

LangChain, Haystack, or custom RAG frameworks.

• Familiarity with Whisper (speech-to-text) or audio/video transcription pipelines.
• Frontend knowledge in React.js is a bonus.
• Experience scaling AI systems to serve 10k+ users.
• MLOps exposure (MLFlow, Weights & Biases, etc.).