Forward Deploy AI Engineer (SLM)

Avathon; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 2,500,000 - 3,500,000; Full time

Job summary

Avathon is seeking an experienced Staff Data Scientist specialized in Supply Chain AI in Bengaluru, India. This role focuses on building Small Language Models to optimize logistics and forecasting applications, contributing directly to real product solutions for enterprises. Candidates should have over 8 years of experience in analytics, a solid understanding of supply chain workflows, and proficiency in SLMs and Python. Avathon offers a meaningful opportunity to impact industries through AI-driven innovations.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in forecasting, optimization, or supply chain analytics.
• Experience with parameter-efficient fine-tuning for high accuracy.
• Hands-on experience taking models from prototype to production.

Responsibilities

• Build and fine-tune SLMs/LLMs for production use cases.
• Measure and improve quality of models.
• Work with engineering, product, and operations teams.

Skills

Working with Small Language Models (SLMs)

Supply chain data and workflows

Python

PyTorch/TensorFlow

GraphQL

Vector databases

Tools

Neo4j

FAISS

AWS

GCP

AZURE

Job description

Overview

Avathon is the only physical AI unicorn headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area. We deploy AI that continuously computes across supply chains, energy systems, and industrial operations. Our Operational Technology platform turns fragmented data into real-time, autonomous decisioning across the systems that power the global economy. This is not digital AI. This is AI for operational reality where latency, constraints, and failure have real-world consequences.

Cutting-Edge AI Innovation – Join a team at the forefront of AI, developing groundbreaking solutions that shape the future.

High-Growth Environment – Thrive in a fast-scaling startup where agility, collaboration, and rapid professional growth are the norm.

Meaningful Impact – Work on AI-driven projects that drive real change across industries and improve lives.

Learn more at: Avathon

Position

Staff Data Scientist – Supply Chain AI (Small Language Models)

At Avathon, we build AI products that solve real industrial problems at scale. We believe the future of enterprise AI lies in small, focused, high-performance models—deeply grounded in domain context—not just large, generic systems. We’re looking for an experienced Data Scientist to join our Supply Chain AI team in India. In this role, you’ll design, fine-tune, and deploy optimized Small Language Models (SLMs) that power production-grade AI features across logistics, planning, inventory, and demand forecasting.

What Makes This Role Unique – This is a product-first data science role. You won’t just build models—you’ll own how they show up in real products used by large enterprises. Your work becomes the intelligence layer that sits on top of our graph and indexing systems and directly drives customer outcomes.

What You’ll Do

• Build and fine-tune SLMs/LLMs for production use cases such as semantic search, forecasting, contract intelligence, and conversational insights. Optimize models for performance, cost, and latency using PEFT, quantization, and efficient inference techniques
• Embed supply chain knowledge into models by working closely with domain experts and product teams
• Enable agentic workflows, allowing AI Assistants to execute planning, optimization, and decision-support tasks
• Integrate models into products using custom Lambdas, and a Graph-based microservices architecture
• Apply vector search and semantic reasoning to help customers navigate complex supply chain relationships
• Work with real enterprise data—ERP, logistics, inventory, supplier, and contract datasets
• Deploy and operate models using strong MLOps practices on platforms like AWS, GCP or AZURE
• Measure and improve quality, reducing hallucinations and improving reliability through continuous evaluation
• Partner with engineering, product, and operations teams to ship impactful AI features end-to-end

What We’re Looking For

• Experience working with SLMs (Mistral, Phi, Nemotron, Llama variants), applying parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA/QLoRA) to optimize task-specific natural language query answering with high accuracy and minimized hallucinations.
• Strong understanding of supply chain data and workflows (logistics, inventory, procurement, ERP systems)
• Familiarity with Knowledge Graphs and graph-based data modeling, including designing and querying Neo4j graphs for relationship-driven insights.
• Solid hands-on skills in Python, PyTorch/TensorFlow, GraphQL, and vector databases
• 8+ years of experience in forecasting, optimization, supply chain analytics, or AI-driven products
• Experience designing Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipelines using document chunking, metadata filtering, hybrid (dense + sparse) retrieval, and SLM/LLM grounding for enterprise knowledge search.
• Hands-on experience building and tuning FAISS-based vector indexes (IVF, HNSW, PQ) for large-scale semantic similarity search with low-latency production deployment
• Experience taking models from prototype to production
• Bonus: reinforcement learning, MARL, graph neural networks, or probabilistic modeling
• Clear communication skills and a strong sense of product ownership

Why Avathon

You’ll work on core AI products, not experiments—solving complex supply chain problems for global enterprises, while building from India as a key innovation hub.

If you enjoy shipping AI that delivers measurable business value, this role is for you.

Avathon is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, pregnancy, genetic information, disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other protected category under applicable federal, state, and local laws.

Avathon is committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruiting process. If you need a reasonable accommodation, please contact us to discuss how we can assist you.