{"id":23834,"url":"https://alion.io/job/interpathadvisory-artificial-intelligence-india-lead","title":"AI - Centre of Excellence Lead, India","company":{"id":6583,"name":"Interpath Advisory","domain":"interpathadvisory.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/interpathadvisory","size_band":"501-1000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workable","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":94,"open_postings":31,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.032,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":69,"computed_at":"2026-10-10T05:45:15Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["Gurgaon, India"],"countries":["IN"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":24000,"max_usd":59000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":32},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agile","optional":false},{"name":"GDPR","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"EU AI Act","optional":true},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-06T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-07-06","last_verified_at":"2026-10-11T19:10:32Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":97,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":[],"days_open":97},"description":"AI Centre of Excellence Lead, India\nAssociate Director\nInterpath | Gurugram\nAbout Interpath\nInterpath is a financial advisory business with a broad range of specialisms that was formed to allow our people to do what they do best in an agile, independent and conflict-free setting.\nWe offer the full spectrum of restructuring services from business performance improvement and value creation through to stress, distress and insolvency offerings. Our advisory practice consists of corporate finance, transaction services, valuations, debt advisory, tax, pensions, forensic accounting and e-discovery services.\nWe help our clients create, defend, preserve, sustain and grow value through the cycle. We work with businesses and their stakeholders across all areas of the market, from regional SMEs all the way up to large, complex multi-national organisations.\nWhy join Interpath now?\nInterpath is an independent, conflict-free advisory business backed by Bridgepoint, one of Europe's leading private equity investors. AI is a funded part of the firm's growth plan and has executive sponsorship behind it. The India Talent Hub builds and runs the firm's technology, and the AI Centre of Excellence is being established there to build and support AI for the whole firm. A team of five is being recruited now and will be in place at about the same time as this appointment, so delivery starts immediately. This is a build role in a small team. The person who takes it will be close to the work, not managing at a distance from it.\nAbout the role\nAn Associate Director appointment reporting to the Head of AI, leading Interpath's AI Centre of Excellence within the India Talent Hub in Gurgaon. The Centre of Excellence builds AI solutions for the whole firm, takes them into production and supports them in use. Its scope covers the firm's client-facing service lines and the firm's own corporate functions, and the strongest of the internal solutions are expected to become propositions the firm can take to clients. This is a professional services business, not a product company or an industrial one, and what gets built has to fit how advisory work is actually done.\nThe Head of AI is a Director-level role based in Europe, reporting to the CTO and AI Steering Committee. The role leads the AI Centre of Excellence and manages a team of five: two AI & Tech Engineering Managers, one PMO Lead and two AI Support colleagues. The team is currently being recruited, with the initial focus on establishing and developing the function.\nThe role is hands-on as well as strategic. In the early stages, the postholder will personally prototype and build AI solutions as the team establishes its capabilities and moves towards production. As the team matures, the focus will increasingly shift towards technical direction, architecture and design reviews, code reviews and team leadership, while retaining the ability to step into delivery when required.\nThe role requires the ability to operate effectively at two levels: providing detailed technical leadership to the engineering team while communicating clearly and concisely with partners, service-line leaders and the AI Steering Committee, with a focus on business outcomes, benefits and priorities.\nThe postholder will be expected to:\n Identify and proactively propose high-value AI use cases, rather than simply respond to requests. \n Establish a structured approach to determine where AI can genuinely add value. \n Assess technical feasibility, risks and potential benefits before work begins. \n Translate complex AI concepts into clear business outcomes for senior stakeholders. \n Build credibility with business partners and challenge assumptions constructively. \n Offer practical alternatives and solutions where they disagree with an approach. \n Build, lead and develop the AI CoE team as the capability scales. \nIn essence, the role requires a leader who combines strong hands-on AI/technical capability with commercial thinking, stakeholder confidence and the ability to build a new AI capability from the ground up.\nLevel, Reporting & Decision Rights:\nAssociate Director grade, reporting to the Head of AI, with a dotted line to the Managing Director, India Talent Hub.\nLine manages the AI Centre of Excellence: two AI and Tech Engineer Managers, one PMO Lead and two AI Support. The five are recruited ahead of this appointment and join at about the same time. The postholder takes them on and owns the team from day one.\nHolds full people management accountability for the team: objectives and goal setting, performance assessment and calibration, feedback, development, progression, capability, capacity and retention, under the firm's performance framework and the India Talent Hub HR process.\nOwns all later hiring and the structure of the team as the portfolio grows.\nAccountable to the Head of AI for delivery of the agreed AI portfolio across the firm: scope, quality, timeline and production readiness.\nHolds technical design authority for solutions built by the Centre of Excellence, within the architecture, tooling and vendor decisions set by the Head of AI, and is expected to contribute to the build directly.\nPrepares initiatives for the 5-pillar governance gate (Desirability, Feasibility, Viability, Control, Compliance). The go, pause or stop decision stays with the Head of AI.\nDecides sequencing, resourcing and capacity within the approved portfolio and budget. Escalates any trade-off that changes scope, cost or the expected benefit.\nAccountable for the confidentiality, privacy and residency of client and firm data handled by the team, under GDPR, UK GDPR, DPDP 2023 and POPIA.\nRepresents the Centre of Excellence at the AI Taskforce and provides the delivery content for AI Steering Committee and Board material prepared by the Head of AI.\nKey Responsibilities\nDelivery for the Firm\nDeliver the agreed AI portfolio end to end: scope, prototype, pilot, harden and move into production, with the Head of AI's quick wins workstream taking priority.\nContribute to the build personally. Prototype, write code and work through technical problems alongside the team in the early months, and remain close enough to the work to review design and code credibly thereafter.\nDesign solutions so that any service line or office can use them, and apply one set of standards, components and delivery patterns across all work.\nOwn solutions once they are live: reliability, run cost, support, model performance and defect resolution, through the AI Support team.\nBuild reusable components so that each new use case takes less time and cost than the last.\nMaintain a single delivery view through the PMO Lead covering milestones, dependencies, RAID and capacity, and feed it into the Head of AI's reporting.\nValue, Adoption & Measurement\nBaseline every initiative before it is built: what the task costs the firm today in time, cost or quality, and what the solution has to beat. An initiative that cannot be baselined should be challenged before it is started.\nMeasure and report benefit after go-live against that baseline, and track adoption separately from benefit. A solution nobody uses has delivered nothing, however well it performs.\nRun this consistently across the portfolio so that the Head of AI can report one credible value picture to the AI Steering Committee and the Board.\nOwn the technology and tooling picture for the Centre of Excellence: the models, platforms, data stores, integration and evaluation tooling appropriate to a document-heavy, confidentiality-constrained advisory firm. Propose it, justify it and keep it current with the Head of AI.\nPeople Leadership\nTake on the team recruited ahead of the start date, establish how it works and set individual objectives within the first few weeks.\nOwn the full people cycle for the team: goal setting aligned to the AI portfolio, mid-year and year-end performance assessment, calibration, regular feedback, development plans, progression cases and retention.\nManage the two Engineer Managers as delivery owners, accountable for design quality, delivered outcomes and the performance of their own team members.\nBuild technical depth in the team, and enough understanding of restructuring, transaction services and forensics for the team to know what it is automating.\nOwn hiring, onboarding and team structure as the Centre of Excellence grows, including succession for critical roles.\nSupport the firm's AI literacy and adoption programme in India, and represent the Head of AI in India-based forums where asked.\nUse Cases & Business Contribution\nWork from a structured method for finding where AI belongs: map how the work is done now, where time and cost sit, where quality fails and what the operating model would look like afterwards. A catalogue of use cases is an output of that method, not a substitute for it.\nWork with service line teams, capability sponsors and the AI Taskforce across the firm to identify and shape use cases, starting with the manual data work in transaction services and comparable delivery bottlenecks.\nWork with the firm's own corporate functions, including finance, HR, IT, marketing and operations, to automate internal processes, and develop the strongest of those solutions into propositions the firm can take to clients. Internal work is not lower value work: it is where the firm proves what it can sell.\nPut candidate use cases to the Head of AI with a clear view on feasibility, effort and data readiness, including those that should not proceed.\nBuild the business case with the sponsor, so that adoption and benefit remain the sponsor's responsibility.\nReport back on live use: what is adopted, where solutions fail, what needs improvement and what should be withdrawn.\nGovernance, Risk & Data\nPrepare every initiative for the governance gate and keep the team's entries in the central AI opportunity register current and accurate.\nOperate the controls for client confidential data: need-to-know access, separation between engagement teams, residency, retention, and the data terms attached to models and vendors.\nRaise independence, conflict of interest and cross-border data questions early, working with Legal, Data Governance, IT and InfoSec.\nApply responsible AI practice in the build: evaluation before release, human review where the output carries risk, traceability, and handling of bias and model error.\nCommercial & Vendor\nApply the buy-before-build principle set by the Head of AI. Build only where the return or the intellectual property case is proven.\nManage day-to-day delivery with build partners and vendors used by the team, holding them to scope, cost and quality.\nTrack the run cost of what the team builds, including platform and token consumption, against the agreed budget.\nRequirements\nEssential\nAI Delivery Track Record:\n10 to 15 years across data, AI and engineering, including 4 or more years leading technical teams. A record of taking AI, ML or GenAI solutions into production at enterprise scale, with specific examples of what went live and the benefit delivered.\nHands-On Technical Contribution:\nStill builds. Able to prototype, write code and work a technical problem through personally, and to review design and code credibly. Candidates whose contribution for several years has been direction and oversight alone are not a fit for this role.\nEvidence of Personal Contribution:\nAble to describe what they personally did on the work they cite, distinct from what their team or their organisation did. Answers that stay in collective terms when a personal example is asked for will be treated as an absence of evidence.\nPeople Leadership:\nExperience running the full people cycle for a technical team: objectives, performance assessment, difficult feedback, development and progression, including managing through managers. Evidence of retaining and developing technical staff, supported by specific examples.\nWorking Without a Large Support Structure:\nExperience delivering in a small team...","description_format":"text","description_chars":17736,"description_truncated":true,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"master","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"India","iso":"IN","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Financial Advisory, Valuation & Restructuring"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-07-06T00:00:00Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":30,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.687,"p_room":0.44,"age_days":96,"expected_fill_days":69,"reasons":["conf:0","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-10T05:45:15Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/interpathadvisory-artificial-intelligence-india-lead","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/interpathadvisory-artificial-intelligence-india-lead.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-11T21:50:27Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":11055,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-12T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":6583},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=6583"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Finterpathadvisory-artificial-intelligence-india-lead"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Finterpathadvisory-artificial-intelligence-india-lead"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Finterpathadvisory-artificial-intelligence-india-lead"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/interpathadvisory-artificial-intelligence-india-lead\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Finterpathadvisory-artificial-intelligence-india-lead"}]}