Back to all roles

AI Platform

/

Senior leadership

Staff ML Engineer — Applied

Applied ML & Agents

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

Compensation

INR 45 - 75 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

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

LLM agents, function calling, tool useRAG architectures, embedding models, vector DBsStructured output (constrained decoding, JSON mode, grammars)PyTorch / transformers at production depthStrong product instinctsEval-driven development discipline

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.

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 100

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

Staff ML Engineer — Applied

Apply →