Director ai & data analytics (for an it product company)

Location: Bengaluru

Job Title: Director/Senior Director AI & Data Analytics

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

Employment Type: Full-time

Industry: B2 B Saa S Product Company

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 Saa S 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:

AI Strategy & Leadership

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 Saa S products. Build intelligent features leveraging: Generative AI Large Language Models (LLMs) AI Agents & Agentic Workflows Machine Learning & Deep Learning 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: AI Engineers ML Engineers Data Scientists MLOps Engineers Applied Scientists Data Engineers 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 lifecycle management 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 B2 B Saa S 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:

AI & Machine Learning

Generative AI Large Language Models (Open AI, Anthropic, Gemini, Llama, etc.) Agentic AI / Autonomous Agents Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Fine-tuning & Prompt Engineering NLP Deep Learning Reinforcement Learning (good to have)

AI Frameworks

Lang Chain Lang Graph Llama Index Auto Gen Crew AI Semantic Kernel MCP (Model Context Protocol)

Machine Learning

Tensor Flow Py Torch Scikit-learn XGBoost

Programming

Python (mandatory) SQL Java/Scala/Go (good to have)

Cloud & Infrastructure

Azure AWS GCP Kubernetes Docker

MLOps

MLflow Kubeflow Airflow Weights & Biases Vector Databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus, FAISS)

Data

Spark Kafka Snowflake Databricks Big Query (good to have)

Leadership Competencies

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. Strong customer-first mindset. 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 Saa S 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 B2 B Saa S market.