Software Engineer - Artificial Intelligence

Designation - Software Engineer - Artificial Intelligence

Business Unit - Higher Education

Department - Technology

Experience Range - 4 years

Location - Bengaluru, Karnataka

About upGrad:

upGrad is one of India's leading higher edtech platforms, serving millions of learners across 100+ countries 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 Software Engineer – Artificial Intelligence who is passionate about building intelligent systems that solve real-world problems. You'll work at the intersection of machine learning, large language models (LLMs), and backend engineering, turning research into production-ready systems.

This is a hands-on engineering role with a strong emphasis on scalable AI integration, prompt engineering, RAG (retrieval-augmented generation), and building intelligent APIs and microservices.

What You'll Do

• Design and build AI-powered applications using LLMs (OpenAI, LLaMA, Mistral, etc.), 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 Whisper, HuggingFace, 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 with LLMs, generative AI, or custom ML workflows.
• Strong understanding 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 withWhisper (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.).