Lead Engineer - IT

India; Chennai District; On-site; INR 2,800,000 - 4,200,000; Full time

Job summary

Guardian Life in Chennai seeks an AI Engineer with 4–8 years of experience to design, develop, and deploy scalable AI solutions across traditional ML and GenAI use cases. You’ll build end-to-end pipelines, perform model evaluation, and contribute to production-grade AI services and APIs.

Expect collaboration with data scientists and software engineers, a strong emphasis on Python, AWS, and MLOps practices, and opportunities to work on innovative GenAI features like RAG and agentic workflows.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, Engineering, or related field.
• 4-8 years of experience in AI/ML or Data Science roles.
• Strong Python programming and AWS experience.

Responsibilities

• Build end-to-end ML solutions for classification, regression, recommendation, forecasting, clustering, anomaly detection, and optimization problems.
• Perform feature engineering, model experimentation, hyperparameter tuning, and model evaluation.
• Design and execute A/B testing and model validation strategies.
• Develop explainable and auditable ML models for business-critical applications.
• Monitor model performance and support retraining initiatives.
• Design and develop LLM-powered applications.
• Build RAG systems using vector databases and enterprise knowledge repositories.
• Develop AI copilots, intelligent assistants, and agentic workflows.
• Implement prompt engineering, prompt optimization, evaluation frameworks, and guardrails.
• Develop production-grade AI services, APIs, SDKs, and microservices.
• Design scalable REST APIs and event-driven architectures.
• Apply design patterns, SOLID principles, and clean coding standards.
• Work with Docker, EKS, SNS, SQS, and other AWS services.

Skills

Python

SQL & Data Analysis

Machine Learning

Generative AI

LLMs / NLP

API & Microservices

AWS Cloud

Docker

Kubernetes

DevOps / MLOps

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/DS/AI/Engineering

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Spark

OpenSearch

LangChain

LangGraph

AWS

Job description

Job Title: AI Engineer (Machine Learning & Generative AI)

We are looking for an experienced AI Engineer with 4-8 years of experience in Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Generative AI. The ideal candidate will design, develop, and deploy scalable AI solutions across traditional machine learning and GenAI use cases.

Qualifications

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, Engineering, or related field.

4-8 years of experience in AI/ML or Data Science roles.

Strong Python programming and AWS experience.

Key Responsibilities

• Build end-to-end ML solutions for classification, regression, recommendation, forecasting, clustering, anomaly detection, and optimization problems.
• Perform feature engineering, model experimentation, hyperparameter tuning, and model evaluation.
• Design and execute A/B testing and model validation strategies.
• Develop explainable and auditable ML models for business-critical applications.
• Monitor model performance and support retraining initiatives.
• Design and develop LLM-powered applications.
• Build RAG systems using vector databases and enterprise knowledge repositories.
• Develop AI copilots, intelligent assistants, and agentic workflows.
• Implement prompt engineering, prompt optimization, evaluation frameworks, and guardrails.
• Develop production-grade AI services, APIs, SDKs, and microservices.
• Design scalable REST APIs and event-driven architectures.
• Apply design patterns, SOLID principles, and clean coding standards.
• Work with Docker, EKS, SNS, SQS, and other AWS services.

Must-Have Skills

• Python: Strong hands-on experience with Python for developing production-grade AI and machine learning applications. Ability to write clean, maintainable, and reusable code following software engineering best practices. Experience developing APIs, automation frameworks, and AI services using Python.
• SQL & Data Analysis: Strong proficiency in SQL for data extraction, transformation, and analysis. Experience working with large-scale structured and semi-structured datasets. Ability to perform exploratory data analysis and derive business insights from data.
• Machine Learning: Strong expertise in machine learning algorithms and techniques including: Classification, Regression, Clustering, Recommendation Systems, Forecasting, Anomaly Detection. Hands-on experience with: Scikit-Learn, XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost. Deep understanding of: Feature Engineering, Model Evaluation, Hyperparameter Tuning, Cross Validation, Explainable AI, Deep Learning & NLP. Practical experience developing NLP solutions using TensorFlow or PyTorch. Understanding of transformers, embeddings, and modern NLP techniques. Experience with text classification, semantic search, summarization, information extraction, and conversational AI use cases.
• Generative AI: Hands-on experience building enterprise-grade GenAI applications. Strong understanding of: Large Language Models (LLMs), Prompt Engineering, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Agentic AI Workflows, Structured Output Generation, Evaluation Frameworks. Experience using frameworks such as: LangChain, LangGraph.
• API & Software Engineering: Experience designing and developing RESTful APIs and microservices. Strong understanding of design patterns, object-oriented programming, and SOLID principles. Experience creating reusable AI components, SDKs, and shared libraries.
• AWS Cloud Technologies: Working knowledge of AWS services commonly used for AI applications including: Amazon EKS, SNS, SQS, Lambda, S3, API Gateway. Ability to build scalable, cloud-native AI solutions.
• Containerization: Experience with Docker for packaging and deploying AI applications. Understanding of container-based application development and deployment.
• Version Control: Strong experience with Git and collaborative development workflows including code reviews, branching strategies, and release management.

Good-to-Have Skills

• Apache Spark: Experience processing large-scale datasets using Spark. Understanding of distributed data processing and big data workloads.
• AI Agent Frameworks: Experience with CrewAI or similar multi-agent frameworks. Understanding of agent orchestration, tool usage, memory management, and autonomous workflows.
• Vector Databases: Experience working with one or more of: OpenSearch, pgvector. Knowledge of embeddings, vector search, and semantic retrieval techniques.
• Knowledge Graphs & GraphRAG: Understanding of knowledge graph concepts and graph-based retrieval techniques. Exposure to GraphRAG architectures for improving reasoning and explainability.
• Event-Driven Architecture: Understanding of event-driven design patterns. Experience integrating SNS, SQS, Kafka, or similar messaging technologies into AI solutions.

Location

This position can be based in any of the following locations: Chennai.

Company Information

Every day, Guardian helps our 29 million customers realize their dreams through a range of insurance and financial products and services. Our Purpose, to inspire well-being, guides our dedication to the colleagues, consumers, and communities we serve. We know that people count, and we go above and beyond to prepare them for the life they want to live, focusing on their overall well-being — mind, body, and wallet. As one of the largest mutual insurance companies, we put our customers first. Behind every bright future is a GuardianTM. Learn more about Guardian at guardianlife.com.

Visa Sponsorship

Guardian Life is not currently or in the foreseeable future sponsoring employment-based visas (e.g., such as an H-1B). In order to be a successful applicant, you must be legally authorized to work in the United States, without the need for employer sponsorship/support now or at any time in the future.