Director AI & Data Analytics (For an IT Product Company)

Crystal Peak; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 10,800,000 - 18,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Crystal Peak is seeking a visionary Head of AI to lead our AI strategy, product innovation, and engineering execution. This is a leadership role for someone who has built and scaled AI products from concept to production while growing AI organizations from the ground up.

The ideal candidate will have experience building AI-first SaaS products, defining long-term AI roadmaps, hiring and mentoring top AI talent, and scaling teams from 10 to 100+ members.

Qualifications

• 15-20+ years of overall experience in Software Engineering, Data Science, and AI.
• 8-10+ years of experience leading AI/ML organizations.
• Proven experience building and launching AI-powered products in a B2B SaaS product company.
• Demonstrated success in scaling AI teams from 10 to 100+ members.
• Strong experience managing multiple engineering managers and senior technical leaders.
• Experience working with global product teams and enterprise customers.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the company's AI vision, strategy, and execution roadmap.
• Drive AI adoption across all product lines and business functions.
• Identify new AI opportunities aligned with customer needs and business goals.
• Build a culture of innovation, experimentation, and engineering excellence.
• Lead the design, development, and deployment of AI-powered SaaS products.
• Build intelligent features leveraging Generative AI, AI Agents & Agentic Workflows, NLP, Recommendation Systems, Predictive Analytics, and CV where applicable.
• Own the end-to-end AI product lifecycle—from ideation to production and continuous improvement.
• Architect scalable AI platforms and ML infrastructure; establish MLOps, model evaluation, and data governance practices.
• Partner with Product and GTM teams to define AI-driven product strategy and measure business impact.

Skills

Leadership

AI Strategy

Product Leadership

Team Building

Mentoring

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Engineering

Master's or Ph.D. in AI/ML/CS/DS preferred

Tools

LangChain

LangGraph

AutoGen

CrewAI

Semantic Kernel

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Scikit-learn

XGBoost

MLflow

Airflow

Weights & Biases

Job description

Job Title: Director/Senior Director AI & Data Analytics

Budget: Upto 1.8 Cr (Fixed + Variable, based on experience and fit)

Employment Type: Full-time

About the Role:

We are looking for a visionary Head of AI to lead our AI strategy, product innovation, and engineering execution. This is a leadership role for someone who has successfully built and scaled AI products from concept to production while growing high-performing AI organizations from the ground up.

The ideal candidate has experience building AI-first SaaS products, defining long-term AI roadmaps, hiring and mentoring world-class AI talent, and scaling teams from 10 to 100+ members. You will work closely with Product, Engineering, Sales, Customer Success, and Executive Leadership to embed AI into the company's core product offerings.

Key Responsibilities:

• Define and own the company's AI vision, strategy, and execution roadmap.
• Drive AI adoption across all product lines and business functions.
• Identify new AI opportunities aligned with customer needs and business goals.
• Build a culture of innovation, experimentation, and engineering excellence.

AI Product Development

• Lead the design, development, and deployment of AI-powered SaaS products.
• Build intelligent features leveraging:
• Generative AI
• AI Agents & Agentic Workflows
• NLP
• Recommendation Systems
• Predictive Analytics
• Computer Vision (where applicable)
• Ensure production-grade AI systems with strong scalability, reliability, security, and observability.
• Own the end-to-end AI product lifecycle-from ideation to production and continuous improvement.

Team Building & Organizational Leadership

• Build, scale, and lead an AI organization from 10 to 100+ professionals, including:
• Data Scientists
• Applied Scientists
• AI Product Managers
• Hire, mentor, and retain top AI talent.
• Establish engineering standards, performance metrics, and career development frameworks.
• Foster cross-functional collaboration between AI, Product, Engineering, and Business teams.

Technical Leadership

• Architect scalable AI platforms and ML infrastructure.
• Establish best practices around:
• MLOps
• Model evaluation and monitoring
• Data governance
• Responsible AI
• AI Security
• AI Observability
• Drive adoption of cloud-native AI architectures.

Business & Customer Impact

• Partner with Product and GTM teams to define AI-driven product strategy.
• Translate customer problems into scalable AI solutions.
• Present AI vision and product roadmap to executive leadership, customers, investors, and partners.
• Measure business impact through AI adoption, customer value, and revenue growth.

Required Skills & Experience

Experience

• 15-20+ years of overall experience in Software Engineering, Data Science, and AI.
• 8-10+ years of experience leading AI/ML organizations.
• Proven experience building and launching AI-powered products in a B2B SaaS product company.
• Demonstrated success in scaling AI teams from 10 to 100+ members.
• Strong experience managing multiple engineering managers and senior technical leaders.
• Experience working with global product teams and enterprise customers.

Technical Expertise:

• Generative AI
• Agentic AI / Autonomous Agents
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
• Fine-tuning & Prompt Engineering
• NLP
• Reinforcement Learning (good to have)

AI Frameworks

• LangChain
• LangGraph
• AutoGen
• CrewAI
• Semantic Kernel
• TensorFlow
• PyTorch
• Scikit-learn
• XGBoost

Programming

• Python (mandatory)
• SQL
• Java/Scala/Go (good to have)
• AWS
• GCP
• Docker

MLOps

• MLflow
• Airflow
• Weights & Biases

Data

• Spark
• Kafka
• Snowflake
• Databricks
• BigQuery (good to have)
• Exceptional people leadership and coaching skills.
• Proven experience building organizations from scratch.
• Strategic thinker with strong execution capability.
• Ability to influence C-level executives and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills.
• Comfortable operating in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• Master's or Ph.D. in AI, Machine Learning, Computer Science, or Data Science preferred.
• Publications, patents, or open-source contributions in AI are a plus.
• Experience building AI platforms serving enterprise-scale SaaS customers.

Success Metrics

• Successfully build and scale a high-performing AI organization from 10 to 100+ members.
• Deliver AI-powered product capabilities that drive measurable customer adoption and business growth.
• Improve AI platform scalability, reliability, and deployment velocity.
• Establish a mature AI engineering and MLOps practice.
• Position the company as an AI-first leader in the B2B SaaS market.