AI Platform
/Senior leadership
Staff ML Engineer — Applied
Applied ML & Agents
Compensation
INR 45 - 75 LPA
Engagement
Full-Time
Permanent role. Full-time commitment. This is an on-site role at Kolkata. It is not remote and not hybrid.
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
Take our foundation models and turn them into product. Agents, retrieval, tools, evals, structured output. You are the bridge between the research lab and what users actually see inside AquinTutor, the AI tutor, the proctoring assistant. The role exists because most "LLM features" fail in production not because the model is wrong, but because the surrounding system is sloppy — bad retrieval, fragile prompts, no evals, no fallback. You will fix that, and you will train the rest of the team in how to.
02 — The work
What you will own
- 01 Build agents and tool-using systems on top of our LLMs.
- 02 Design retrieval and grounding pipelines that actually work at production scale.
- 03 Author the applied-ML eval harness; make it the place we discover regressions before users do.
- 04 Ship LLM features inside AquinTutor, the AI tutor, the proctoring assistant.
- 05 Lead the prompt engineering and system-prompt design practice.
- 06 Mentor mid and senior ML engineers; bring at least one to Senior readiness over 18 months.
03 — The expertise
What we look for
04 — The bar
Who thrives here
- → You have shipped at least two LLM-backed product features that survived contact with real users for 6+ months.
- → You can describe a specific LLM regression you caught with an eval that you wrote yourself.
- → You write better prompts than the people you work with — and you can teach them why.
- → You have read enough agent literature to have an opinion about what does and does not work.
- → You write code that you would be comfortable showing in a code review at Anthropic or DeepMind.
Terms of Engagement
How working time works at this level
No counted hours. A five-day week with a four-hour overlap window, plus responsibility for the coverage of your area — including who is on call and when.
Type
Lead
Working days
5 per week
Rest days
2 per week
Hours counted
No
Daily overlap
4h
Measured by
The outcomes of the area you lead, the reliability of its coverage, and the growth of the people in it.
Where this stands legally
Hours are not counted at this level. The statutory ceiling of 9 hours a day and 48 a week remains the limit the role is designed to fit inside: if the work cannot be done within a normal week, the scope is wrong, not the person.
The full per-level model is published at Working Hours by Level.
05 — Hiring process
What to expect after you apply
- 01
Application review
Every application is read personally within five business days. We respond either way.
- 02
Take-home or live exercise
Role-specific. Time-boxed. Real problems we are actually working on, not invented puzzles.
- 03
Conversations
Deep technical and values conversations with the team you would join. No trick questions. No panel ambushes.
- 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.
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. Applying is free, and every application is read by a human — recruitment, technical, academic and leadership teams. It buys us the right to be honest.
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.
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