Software Engineer Embedded AI

Athena Infonomics; India; On-site; INR 900,000 - 1,500,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible hours

Autonomy and professional growth

Thought leadership opportunities

Job summary

APLYD, part of the Athena Infonomics group, is seeking an entry-level Software Engineer, Embedded AI in India. You will write production software and train models within government-focused systems, starting with data preparation and progressing to deployment under senior review.

You will work on registries, wallet layers, and offline-first clients, ensuring robust engineering before any model layer is added. Collaboration and clear communication are essential.

Qualifications

• 0–2 years of experience or a related degree in CS/engineering/statistics.
• Clean, tested Python code and end-to-end projects.
• Experience training and evaluating models on real data; explain choices.
• Proficiency with pandas and scikit-learn; PyTorch or TensorFlow preferred.
• Understanding of train/validation/test, overfitting, leakage, and why accuracy isn’t always the best metric.
• Solid SQL, Git, and shell basics; knowledge of how a web service and DB fit together.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain the components you are given: services, endpoints, jobs, pipelines and interfaces, to the team’s standard.
• Train and evaluate models on the problems you are given and review before deployment.
• Create evaluation harnesses: test sets, metrics, subgroup analyses, and reproducibility scripts.
• Reproduce model results or system behavior and report differences.
• Ingest data, validate, engineer features, and reconcile with government sources.
• Write tests, ensure code reviews happen, keep the build green.
• Test the system under slow connections and older devices.
• Keep documentation current: what was built, how to run, how to retrain, what to check if fail.
• Ask early when something won’t work.

Skills

Python

Pandas

Scikit-learn

PyTorch

TensorFlow

SQL

Git

Shell

Education

BS in CS/Engineering/Statistics

Tools

Docker

Job description

Job Description

Position: Software Engineer, Embedded AI

Team: Embedded AI Engineering

Level and grade: L1 on the Embedded AI Engineering band

Position type: Full time, permanent

Location: India

Reports to: Senior Software Engineer II, Embedded AI

Travel: Up to 15 percent

About Us

APLYD helps governments, multilateral institutions, development finance institutions and foundations use AI in public systems. Most public-sector AI stops at the pilot. Our work is getting it into everyday service delivery and keeping it running once we leave.

Athena Infonomics has done this work for years. In 2026 we set it up as its own company. We cover strategy and readiness, field data and last-mile reach, design and build, evaluation and audit, and scale and production.

440+ engagements

• 240+ global clients
• 85+ specialists
• 7 countries
• 5 continents

The Role

You write code that goes into systems government departments run on, and you train models that sit inside them, with a senior engineer reviewing your work. Expect to spend a good deal of your first year on data, because a system is only as good as what goes into it and government data arrives in poor condition. Three seats are open across two rural digital infrastructure programmes.

Most of what we build is not a model. Registries, credential and wallet layers, group financial records, synchronisation for intermittent connectivity, offline-first clients and the migrations that keep them alive are the bulk of the work, and they have to be engineered properly before any model on top of them is worth anything.

We do not staff a specialist for each component. Everyone here writes production software and everyone here builds models; the levels are separated by the scope a person carries rather than by the technology they work on.

Core Job Responsibilities

• Build and maintain the components you are given: services, endpoints, jobs, pipelines and interfaces, to the standard the team sets.
• Train and evaluate models on the problems you are given, and take them through review to deployment.
• Build the evaluation harnesses: the test sets, the metrics, the subgroup breakdowns, and the scripts that make a result reproducible.
• Reproduce a model result or a system behaviour from scratch and report where it differs.
• Get data into a usable state. Ingestion, validation, feature engineering, and reconciliation against government source systems.
• Write tests and keep them passing, take code review seriously, and keep the build green.
• Test the way the system will actually be used, including on slow connections and older devices.
• Keep documentation current: what was built, how to run it, how to retrain it, and what to check when it fails.
• Ask early when something is not going to work.

Qualifications And Competencies

• Zero to two years of experience, or a degree in computer science, engineering, statistics or a related field with work you can show.
• You write clean, tested code in Python, and you have built something end to end that someone other than you has used.
• You have trained and evaluated a model on real data, end to end, and you can explain the choices you made.
• Working knowledge of pandas and scikit-learn. Familiarity with PyTorch or TensorFlow is expected rather than optional.
• You understand train, validation and test, overfitting, leakage, and why accuracy is often the wrong metric.
• SQL, Git and a shell, and a basic grasp of how a web service and a database fit together.
• You use AI coding tools and have a sense of where they stop being reliable.
• You write clearly and ask for help when you need it.

Also useful, though we will not screen on it

• A cloud platform or containers.
• A project using a public-sector or development dataset.
• Language models, retrieval or forecasting.
• Open-source contributions.

Additional Requirements

• This position requires successful completion of a reference check and employment verification.
• The successful candidate must not be subject to employment restrictions from a former employer, such as a non-compete, that would prevent performance of the responsibilities described.
• Candidates must declare any current or recent engagement with a government, multilateral or development finance institution that could present a conflict of interest.

APLYD’s Work Culture

At APLYD, we function in an outcomes-based work environment with flexible hours and a high level of autonomy. Professional development and thought leadership are key elements of our business model: we support our team members’ professional growth through on-the-job training, and we encourage the cultivation of our colleagues’ personal brands through participation in panels, events, publications, and other thought-leadership opportunities. We embrace a transparent, open work environment with meaningful leadership pathways for those with inventive ideas and initiatives.

APLYD is an Equal Opportunities Employer

APLYD, part of the Athena Infonomics group, is an equal opportunity employer with a commitment to diversity. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, protected veteran status, or disability status.

AI Proficiency and Responsible Use

Proficiency in the responsible and sophisticated use of AI is a mandatory requirement for all roles, across all levels and functions at APLYD and Athena Infonomics.