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Director of Engineering — AI Platform

AI Platform Leadership

Lead Full-Time Remote (India preferred) / Guwahati Permanent

Compensation

INR 50 - 80 LPA + equity.

Engagement

Full-Time

Permanent role. Full-time commitment. Remote-first, with periodic in-person off-sites.

Scope of role

Set direction within your domain. Build and mentor a team. Own outcomes at the function level.

01 — The role

Why this role exists at EduRankAI

Lead the AI platform org — training infrastructure, inference, evals, agents, observability. The systems that turn research code into production model serving. Two staff-level engineers and a growing team of mid/senior ICs report to you. You will partner closely with the research scientists. The handoff between a research notebook and a production training run is where a lot of labs lose months. You will own that handoff.

02 — The work

What you will own

  • 01 Lead the AI platform team: training infra, inference, eval, agents, observability.
  • 02 Own the model lifecycle from research handoff to production release.
  • 03 Architect the inference fleet and serving stack (cost, latency, reliability SLOs).
  • 04 Hire ML platform engineers — Staff, Senior, Mid.
  • 05 Set the eval + safety release bar for every model that goes to production.
  • 06 Liaise with research scientists weekly; turn hypotheses into experiment infrastructure.
  • 07 Own the cost-per-token reporting that finance and the CTO depend on.

03 — The expertise

What we look for

Led ML/LLM platform teams at scaleDistributed training (FSDP / DeepSpeed / Megatron)Inference optimisation (vLLM / TensorRT-LLM / SGLang)Strong systems engineeringFamiliar with frontier-lab tooling

04 — The bar

Who thrives here

  • You have led an ML platform team that trained and served at least one model at 7B+ parameters in production.
  • You have shipped at least one inference optimisation that produced a measurable cost or latency win.
  • You have hired at least two Staff or Senior ML platform engineers and retained them past 18 months.
  • You can describe a research-to-production handoff that failed and the systems change you made so it never failed the same way again.
  • You have an opinion on the right scope split between research engineering and ML platform engineering, and you can defend it.

05 — How we work

The EduRankAI environment

Remote-first, async-first

Work from anywhere. We optimise for deep work, not face time. Periodic in-person off-sites for the full-time team.

High autonomy, high standards

We hire adults and trust them. You will be expected to set your own goals, communicate clearly, and ship.

Builders, not bureaucrats

We optimise for clarity over process. Make the call, ship the work, write up what you learned.

Bharat-built, globally ambitious

We are an Indian frontier AI lab. We build for India first and the world second — in that order.

06 — Hiring process

What to expect after you apply

  1. 01

    Application review

    Every application is read personally within five business days. We respond either way.

  2. 02

    Take-home or live exercise

    Role-specific. Time-boxed. Real problems we are actually working on, not invented puzzles.

  3. 03

    Conversations

    Deep technical and values conversations with the team you would join. No trick questions. No panel ambushes.

  4. 04

    Offer or honest no

    If yes: digital offer letter, signed in-portal, transparent terms. If no: written feedback if you want it.

Before you start

What we will collect. What it costs. What we will not do with it.

Application fee

CHF 50

Lead tier

We will collect

  • Name, email, phone — Account + application updates. No marketing.
  • Resume / portfolio link — Human review of your work.
  • Date + place of birth — Identity verification only.
  • Your written responses — Selection rubric. Read by humans.
  • Government ID (later) — Anti-fraud at offer / interview stage. Not at signup.

We will never

  • Sell your data
  • Share with third-party recruiters
  • Use for advertising
  • Train models on it
  • Send marketing email

Our situation

EduRankAI is a small, independent organization building long-term capabilities in educational intelligence, advanced AI systems, and research infrastructure. We take no advertiser money, no donations with strings attached, and no investor pressure on hiring decisions. The small per-application fee covers the real cost of processing your application — human review, identity verification, infrastructure, reviewer time. It buys us the right to be honest. Genuine financial hardship? Request a fee waiver inside the application — reviewed individually within 5 business days, with no record in your file and no second-class treatment of waiver-granted applications.

Full transparency policy Why we charge a fee Questions? Email us

Ready to apply?

We read every application personally. If you are the right person for this role — regardless of pedigree, background, or where you are based — you will hear back from us within five business days.

Lead Full-Time

Director of Engineering — AI Platform

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