Technical Lead

Job Title: Technical Lead

Organisation: Inflect Consulting

Location: New Delhi

Reports to: Founder’s Office

Experience: 5+ years (Software Engineering & AI/ML)

Qualification: B.Tech / M.Tech in Computer Science (or equivalent) from a reputed institute

About Inflect Inflect is a policy intelligence and systems-diagnostics firm working at the intersection of public policy, regulatory foresight, and institutional reform. We partner with governments, multilaterals, and private-sector stakeholders to diagnose systemic delivery failures, map policy architecture, and design implementation-ready interventions across sectors, including climate resilience, public health, fiscal systems, digital governance, land administration, EV policy, and social protection. Our work is deeply research-driven, politically informed, and implementation-focused. We are building a team that combines analytical rigour with strong stakeholder engagement and the ability to translate complex policy insight into actionable partnerships.

Role Overview The Technical Lead will architect, build, and deploy production-grade AI/ML systems and platform infrastructure tailored to address public policy challenges, ranging from impact evaluation and predictive analytics to LLM-based research tools and agentic workflows. This role blends senior software engineering ownership (system architecture, microservices, DevOps) with hands-on AI/ML delivery (LLMs, RAG pipelines, model evaluation), applied to policy-relevant use cases. Beyond their engineering output, this person will be a senior point of reference within the team. Colleagues working on technical implementations from AI-based data extraction to geospatial analysis and ML classification of government schemes will rely on them to provide sound architecture, validate research outputs, and ensure that the firm's technology-driven work is engineered to a production-grade standard while remaining anchored in genuine policy understanding.

Candidate Profile Technical Requirements (Must-Have)

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering and enterprise SaaS platforms, including 5+ years specifically in AI/ML.
• Strong expertise in Python, FastAPI, and microservices architecture.
• Experience with AI/ML systems, LLMs, RAG pipelines, and vector databases, with proficiency in PostgreSQL, Redis, and database optimisation.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms such as AWS or GCP, along with DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Experience designing secure, scalable, and highly available systems.
• Experience with monitoring, logging, and observability tools.
• Ability to conduct architecture reviews, code reviews, and mentor engineering teams.
• Strong knowledge of API design, third-party integrations, and data governance practices.
• Excellent problem-solving, stakeholder management, and technical leadership skills.
• Hands-on experience with source code version management systems such as GitHub.

Additional Essential Experience (Policy Context)

• Proven expertise in AI model development for domain-specific use cases, including panel data handling, time-series forecasting, and generative AI for policy drafting or summarisation.
• Experience deploying AI agents (e.g., autonomous agents using frameworks like LangChain, AutoGen, or CrewAI) for policy workflows, such as multi-step reasoning for scenario analysis, real-time data synthesis from government reports, or agentic simulations of economic interventions.
• Strong programming in R/Stata alongside Python, with ML libraries; experience deploying models ethically in regulated environments, such as government data, is an added advantage.

Skills & Attributes

• Intellectual confidence to serve as a senior reference point, comfortable fielding domain questions from technically capable colleagues and providing grounded, well-reasoned answers.
• Organised, thorough, and capable of managing multiple engineering and research workstreams simultaneously without compromising quality.

Preferred / Good to Have

• Experience with AI governance, responsible AI practices, and human-in-the-loop systems.
• Extensive exposure to AI-assisted research workflows, NLP-based classification systems, automated data pipelines, and building AI for public sector applications (e.g., urban planning trends, climate forecasting, or government accounting errors).
• Experience working on development policy issues.
• Familiarity with geospatial or environmental data in a policy and agricultural context.

Qualification

• B.Tech / M.Tech in Computer Science (or a closely related field) from a reputed institute.

Roles and Responsibilities A. Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Take final ownership of system architecture decisions and their long-term maintainability, security, and uptime.
• Run a regular cadence of architecture and code reviews as a quality gate before production releases.
• Mentor engineers day-to-day and act as the escalation point when a technical problem needs senior judgement.
• Sit across from business and policy stakeholders to turn their requirements into a concrete engineering plan and timeline.

B. AI/ML & Platform Engineering

• Lead the design, development, and deployment of end-to-end AI/ML models across priority domains, including data ingestion frameworks, ETL pipelines, model pipelines, and deployment infrastructure.
• Build and maintain backend services and microservices using Python and FastAPI, with clean, well-documented API design and robust third-party integrations.
• Design and operationalise LLM-based systems, RAG pipelines, and vector database integrations for policy research and decision-support use cases.
• Develop and operationalise high-impact use cases, including predictive modelling, NLP-based classification systems, and generative AI applications for policy intelligence.
• Own PostgreSQL and Redis data layers, including schema design, query optimisation, and performance tuning.
• Integrate diverse data sources, including government repositories (eGazette, parliamentary APIs, ministry datasets, PIB), ensuring robustness and interoperability.
• Define and implement rigorous frameworks for model evaluation, validation, and performance monitoring; proactively address model drift and data inconsistencies.
• Lead the translation of AI outputs into deployable products, including dashboards, APIs, and decision-support tools.

C. DevOps & Infrastructure

• Set up and run CI/CD pipelines on AWS or GCP, moving code from commit to production through Docker and Kubernetes.
• Stand up dashboards and alerting so the team is notified of incidents before users are, and can trace the root cause quickly.
• Set the Git/GitHub branching, review, and release conventions that the rest of the engineering team works within.

D. Governance & Responsible AI

• Write and enforce the data-handling rules that govern how the platform stores, accesses, and shares data internally and with partners.
• Build human-in-the-loop checkpoints into AI workflows that touch policy decisions, so outputs are reviewed before they're acted on.
• Run bias and privacy checks before any model touches government data, and document the mitigations applied.

E. Supporting Responsibilities

• Contribute to and maintain shared repositories of datasets, models, codebases, and agent configurations.
• Collaborate with engineers and analysts to refine feature engineering, training schemas, and fine-tuning strategies.

Why Join Inflect

• Work at the frontier of policy intelligence and technology where AI-assisted research meets real government decision-making.
• Operate in an intellectually rigorous environment that treats policy analysis as a discipline, not a support function.
• Engage with complex, consequential policy challenges across India's most important governance domains.
• Be part of building a firm that combines analytical depth with institutional trust and a genuine commitment to policy impact.

How to Apply If you are excited by the prospect of applying your expertise in a technology-forward, analytically rigorous setting, we would like to hear from you. Please share your CV along with a short note describing your experience in software/AI engineering and any exposure to policy research or data-driven, AI-assisted research workflows. You can reach us at team@inflectpolicy.com