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AI Lead Architect

Merkle · Posted Oct 5

Data-driven customer experience management, marketing, and digital transformation services

PuneFull-timeHybridLead/Staff8+ years₹40.0L–₹65.0L yearly100+ applicants
Digital MarketingCustomer Experience ManagementData AnalyticsConsulting ServicesCRMPublic Company
Full time

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About the role

The role sits within Merkle's AI practice, delivering end-to-end AI solutions across Deep Learning, GenAI, Agentic AI, and multimodal use cases for enterprise client engagements. The practice builds reference architectures and design patterns for multimodal agentic systems, SLM adoption, hybrid retrieval across vector, graph, and NoSQL stores, and evaluation, guardrail, and production-readiness standards. This Lead Architect leads hands-on solution engineering, multi-agent system design, GPU/serving operations, and technical leadership and pre-sales solutioning across concurrent projects from the Pune office at least three days a week.

What you will do

  • Lead the hands-on engineering for end-to-end AI solutions across Deep Learning, GenAI, Agentic AI, and multimodal use cases.
  • Apply rigorous "fail fast" logic to all AI project management. Quickly identify, evaluate, and disqualify unviable AI use cases based on technical feasibility, effort, cost, and risk early in the cycle.
  • Perform explicit trade-off analysis on model class (frontier vs. SLM vs. fine-tuned), retrieval design, memory optimization, and orchestration.
  • Lead solutioning, support architecture for end-to-end AI solutions across GenAI, Agentic AI, multimodal, and applied ML use cases, with explicit trade-off analysis on model class (frontier vs. SLM vs. fine-tuned), retrieval design, memory, and orchestration.
  • Own the practice's reference architectures and solution design patterns for multimodal agentic systems, including planning, tool use, memory, grounding, and inter-agent communication (MCP, A2A).
  • Conduct solution design reviews across concurrent client engagements; facilitate subjective technical decisions and enable delivery excellence.
  • Design and lead the build of multi-agent systems with reasoning, planning, tool use, persistent memory, and grounded retrieval.
  • Lead multimodal system design and solutions across text, vision, speech, and structured data, including ingestion, representation, and downstream agent reasoning.
  • Establish patterns for SLM design and adoption — distillation, fine-tuning, quantization, and routing — to meet enterprise constraints on cost, latency, data residency, and on-prem/edge deployment
  • Define hybrid retrieval and knowledge architectures spanning vector, graph (KG), and NoSQL stores; lead KG-assisted retrieval, entity linking, and structured grounding.
  • Establish evaluation as a first-class discipline: design eval frameworks, golden datasets, regression suites, automated and human-in-the-loop evals, and observability for agentic and generative systems.
  • Define and enforce safety, guardrail, and hallucination-control standards across the practice; lead red-teaming and adversarial testing for high-stakes deployments.
  • Set the bar for production readiness—reliability, latency, cost, monitoring, drift detection, and incident response—for AI systems in regulated, enterprise-grade environments.
  • Lead GPU/accelerator ops, model serving, and lifecycle automation for deployment across cloud hyper-scalers, on-prem, and edge.
  • Act as a technical sentinel for the AI practice, mentoring engineers through rigorous code and architecture reviews to ensure permanent capability building rather than temporary crisis management.
  • Establish and enforce AI in SDLC frameworks on delivery projects.
  • Engage with client and stakeholder leadership on architecture, feasibility, and risk; communicate technical direction clearly to non-technical audiences.
  • Support pre-sales and solutioning for new GenAI and Agentic AI opportunities, including effort estimation, architectural framing, and capability storytelling.

Skills used in this role

PythonSQLFastAPIFlaskDjangoDeep LearningMachine LearningTransformersLLMsGenerative AIRAGAgentic AILangGraphLlamaIndexAutoGenPrompt EngineeringFine-TuningLoRAQLoRARLHFQuantizationAWSAzureGCPMongoDB

What the employer is looking for

  • Deep Learning & Machine Learning: Strong hands-on experience with neural networks, Transformers, predictive modeling, embeddings, and vector search.
  • Generative AI: Hands-on experience with LLMs/SLMs, RAG/Agentic RAG, agents, prompt engineering, grounding, multimodal architectures, and production GenAI solutions.
  • Fine-tuning: Practical experience with techniques such as SFT, LoRA/QLoRA, RLHF/RLAIF, distillation, and/or quantization.
  • Agentic AI: Hands-on experience with multi-agent orchestration, planning, tool use, memory, and agentic workflows. Experience with frameworks such as LangGraph, LlamaIndex, or AutoGen.
  • Programming & Engineering: Advanced Python, SQL, strong API/backend engineering experience using FastAPI, Flask, Django, or equivalent frameworks.
  • Production Engineering: Proven experience designing, developing, testing, and deploying AI/ML solutions in enterprise production environments.
  • Cloud: Strong hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform — AWS, Azure, or GCP.
  • Data/Storage: Experience with databases and data platforms such as MongoDB, NoSQL, vector databases, graph databases, or equivalent.
  • Experience: Minimum 8 years of total hands-on software development/engineering experience.
  • AI Experience: Minimum 3+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying Deep Learning/AI systems in production.
  • GenAI/Agentic AI: Demonstrable hands-on experience beyond basic API integrations or simple RAG implementations, such as multi-agent systems, custom fine-tuning, advanced RAG, or SLM deployments.
  • Work Location: Willingness to work from the Pune office at least 3 days per week.
  • Equipped with a builder's hands and a highly pragmatic approach to enterprise AI.
  • Prioritizes technical validation, pragmatic domain expertise, and rigorous testing over "AI hype."
  • Open and flexible toward a hybrid work structure with no less than 3 days work from the office in Pune, ensuring regular connection and cross-project knowledge.

Preferred qualifications

  • Experience with commerce cloud ecosystems (Salesforce and Adobe).

Benefits and support

  • Compensation and benefits are detailed in the job posting

About Merkle

Merkle logo

Merkle

Company website
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Merkle is a data-driven, technology-enabled customer experience management (CXM) company and part of the dentsu network. It specializes in delivering unique, personalized customer experiences across platforms and devices by leveraging deep capabilities in data science, analytics, and CRM. The company operates globally, helping enterprise brands drive business growth and long-term customer loyalty.

Industry
Digital Marketing
Company size
10001+ employees
Founded
1988
Location
Columbia, Maryland, USA
Funding stage
Acquired

Funding

Acquired

TCVDentsu Group

Leadership

PS
Pete Stein

Global President

DW
David Williams

Chairman / Former CEO

DK
Dan Knauf

Chief Technology Officer, Americas

MF
Missy Foristall

Chief Operating Officer, Americas

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