First seen by Alion on Oct 14, 2026.
We are looking for an AI/ML Engineer (SDE2) who can design, build, and operate production-grade AI systems, with a strong focus on LLM applications, retrieval, memory, and personalization. This role is suited to an engineer who combines strong software engineering fundamentals with hands-on experience building real-world AI applications, not just notebooks, model experiments, or basic LLM API integrations.
The core responsibilities for the job include the following:
Build Conversational AI Systems:
- Develop production-ready conversational AI experiences using LLMs, structured context, and user-specific information. Build systems that maintain conversational context, retrieve relevant past information, and generate personalized responses.
- Improve context selection, follow-up handling, and response consistency across conversations.
Build RAG, Retrieval, and Memory Systems:
- Design and improve retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines using structured data, embeddings, vector search, and graph-based retrieval where appropriate.
- Build long-term memory and user-profile systems that extract, store, update, rank, and retrieve relevant information.
- Handle conflicting information, memory freshness, relevance scoring, deduplication, and context selection.
- Improve retrieval quality, relevance, and personalization through measurable evaluation.
Develop LLM Orchestration and Optimization:
- Design multi-step AI pipelines involving query understanding, retrieval, reasoning, and response generation.
- Optimize model selection, prompt design, tool calls, and pipeline execution.
- Reduce unnecessary LLM calls while balancing quality, latency, and cost.
- Implement fallbacks, retries, timeouts, and graceful degradation for production reliability.
Build Personalization and User Intelligence:
- Develop systems that adapt to user preferences, goals, interests, historical interactions, and evolving context.
- Combine structured user profiles, conversational memory, and retrieved knowledge to improve relevance.
- Explore lightweight ML approaches for classification, ranking, recommendation, and context selection where they outperform additional LLM calls.
Evaluate and Improve AI Quality:
- Design evaluation datasets and test cases for retrieval quality, memory accuracy, personalization, and response consistency.
- Measure quality using appropriate offline evaluations and production metrics.
- Build regression tests to catch failures in prompts, retrieval, memory updates, and model behavior.
- Use evaluation results and production feedback to drive improvements.
Own Production AI Engineering:
- Build clean, maintainable Python services and APIs for AI features.
- Take features end-to-end: design, implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, and iteration.
- Instrument latency, token usage, model costs, errors, and quality-related metrics.
- Debug production failures and improve scalability, security, and operational reliability.
- Collaborate with product and engineering teams to translate user needs into reliable AI capabilities
Requirements:
- 3+ years of experience in software engineering, AI/ML engineering, applied ML, or a closely related role.
- Strong Python programming and software engineering fundamentals, including clean code, API design, debugging, testing, and maintainable architecture.
- Hands-on experience building and deploying AI/ML applications using LLMs, generative AI, NLP, or related technologies.
- Practical understanding of RAG, retrieval, embeddings, search, or context-selection systems.
- Experience building backend services and integrating AI capabilities into real applications.
- Understanding of evaluation methods for AI systems, including how to measure quality and detect regressions.
- Experience with production deployment, Docker, and cloud infrastructure such as AWS or an equivalent platform.
- Ability to reason about system design, latency, cost, reliability, and failure handling.
- Ownership mindset: able to independently take a feature from problem definition through implementation, testing, and deployment.
Good to Have:
- Experience with vector databases or search systems such as Qdrant, pgvector, or similar technologies.
- Experience with graph databases such as Neo4j, knowledge graphs, or graph-based retrieval.
- Familiarity with LLM orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, or comparable tools.
- Experience with Redis, PostgreSQL, S3, background jobs, queues, and asynchronous processing.
- Familiarity with Hugging Face, model serving, vLLM, fine-tuning, or model optimization.
- Experience with recommendation systems, ranking, user modeling, or personalization.
- Experience with observability and evaluation tools such as Langfuse, tracing platforms, or equivalent solutions.
- Experience with multilingual NLP, Indic languages, or domain-specific knowledge systems.
- Interest in astrology, behavioral personalization, or building AI products that improve with continued user interaction.
What Success Looks Like:
- Ship reliable AI features that are used in the MyNaksh product.
- Improve memory, retrieval, and personalization quality using measurable metrics.
- Reduce unnecessary model calls, inference costs, and response latency without compromising quality.
- Build repeatable evaluation and regression-testing workflows for AI features.
- Take ownership of production systems, identify failure modes, and continuously improve reliability and performance.

