{"id":2914405,"url":"https://alion.io/job/open-network-for-digital-commerce-aidata-architect","title":"AI/Data Architect","company":{"id":2047,"name":"Open Network For Digital Commerce","domain":"ondc.org","url":"https://alion.io/company/open-network-for-digital-commerce","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Zoho Recruit","truth_index":null},"role":"Data Science","role_family":"Data Science","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Delhi, India"],"countries":["IN"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":31000,"max_usd":57000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":17},"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"DeepSpeed","optional":false},{"name":"DPO","optional":false},{"name":"DSPy","optional":false},{"name":"Feature Store","optional":false},{"name":"FSDP","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Hugging Face","optional":false},{"name":"Knowledge Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"LangGraph","optional":false},{"name":"LlamaIndex","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":false},{"name":"Megatron-LM","optional":false},{"name":"Model Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"Multi-Agent Systems","optional":false},{"name":"NLP","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"RLHF","optional":false},{"name":"SFT","optional":false},{"name":"Tokenization","optional":false},{"name":"LangChain","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-08T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-08","last_verified_at":"2026-10-22T12:13:11Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":14,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":14},"description":"AI Architect - AI & Intelligent Systems\nArchitect and ship the agentic AI systems that make ONDC's network intelligent.\nDelhi NCR (Work from Office) | 10+ years | Senior Individual Contributor\nAbout ONDC\nONDC is building the next generation of Digital Public Infrastructure for commerce - an interoperable, protocol-based network that unbundles the storefront from the buyer experience, opening digital commerce to millions of small sellers, logistics providers and specialised platforms across retail, mobility, financial services, agriculture and health.\nOur strategic initiatives include VyapaarLM (cognitive infrastructure for commerce), DigiCatalog (digital product infrastructure), a Global Cache Repository, and Agentic Commerce Platforms - investing deeply in applied AI to make the network smarter for buyers, sellers and Network Participants.\nThat is where you come in.\nThe Role\nWe are looking for a hands-on AI Architect to lead the design and productionisation of agentic AI systems on ONDC.\nYou will own the architecture for LLM- and SLM-powered agents that operate across the network, drive the training, distillation and domain adaptation of small language models tuned for Indian commerce, and stand up the MLOps backbone that takes these systems from prototype to production at network scale.\nThis is a senior individual contributor role with significant scope: you will set architectural direction across multiple workstreams, mentor a growing engineering team, and partner with policy, product and Network Participants to ship AI capabilities responsibly and in the open. At ONDC, architects build - you will design, code and be in the room when something breaks in production.\nWhat You'll Own\nDesign and build multi-agent systems for buyer- and seller-side use cases - intent capture, search and discovery, negotiation, order orchestration, and issue/dispute resolution - operating over ONDC's protocol APIs.\n\nDefine patterns for tool use, planning, memory, retrieval and guardrails; establish standards for agent observability, evaluation and safe rollout.\n\nArchitect retrieval-augmented systems over heterogeneous catalog, policy and transaction data, including hybrid lexical + semantic retrieval and multilingual indexing for Indian languages.\n\nLead end-to-end training pipelines for SLMs - data curation, tokenizer choices, supervised fine-tuning, DPO/RLHF and evaluation.\n\nDrive knowledge distillation and quantisation strategies to ship cost-efficient models suitable for edge and low-latency network use cases.\n\nBuild domain adaptation playbooks for Indic languages and commerce-specific tasks, and establish rigorous offline/online evaluation harnesses.\n\nDefine the reference MLOps stack - feature and embedding stores, training orchestration, experiment tracking, model registry, CI/CD for models, and reproducible serving.\n\nStand up scalable inference for batch, real-time and streaming workloads across GPU and CPU fleets, owning latency, throughput and unit-economics targets.\n\nCodify responsible AI practice - data lineage, PII handling, model cards and review gates - aligned with ONDC's open-network and DPI principles.\n\nAuthor RFCs and reusable blueprints adopted across teams and Network Participants, and mentor senior engineers on evaluation rigour and production discipline.\n\nWhat Success Looks Like\nYou become the owner of ONDC's agentic AI architecture - someone who can take an SLM from data curation to production inference, and whose RFCs and reference designs get adopted across teams and Network Participants.\nWhat We're Looking For\n7-10 years of software/ML engineering experience, with at least 3 years shipping production ML or LLM systems at meaningful scale.\n\nDemonstrated depth in modern transformer architectures, training stacks (PyTorch, DeepSpeed/FSDP, Megatron, Hugging Face), and distributed training.\n\nStrong grasp of agentic patterns - planning, tool use, RAG, evaluation - and associated frameworks (LangGraph, LlamaIndex, DSPy, or equivalent in-house).\n\nProduction MLOps experience: model serving, vector stores, feature stores, containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure).\n\nExcellent system design judgment; able to reason about correctness, scale, cost and failure modes simultaneously.\n\nClear written communication - comfortable writing RFCs and influencing without authority across cross-functional and external stakeholders.\n\nA strong plus\nExperience across Indic NLP | multilingual tokenisation | open-source AI/ML contributions | Beckn / UPI / ULI or other India DPI rails | commerce search and fraud/risk ML.\nThis Role Is For You If...\nYou want to build foundational intelligence systems, not just integrate AI APIs.\nYou enjoy reasoning about scale, latency, accuracy, privacy and cost in the same conversation.\nYou want your designs - specs, models, tooling - to largely live in the open, not behind one company's stack.\nAnd you want your work to compound across an ecosystem, not just a product.\nWhy ONDC?\nThis is a rare opportunity to work simultaneously on AI & agentic systems, commerce infrastructure, and population-scale Digital Public Infrastructure.\nYou won't just ship an AI feature.\nYou will help build India's cognitive infrastructure for commerce.\nRead more about ONDC (click to read)\nVisit our website at ondc.org\nMcKinsey Report\nOur latest newsletter","description_format":"text","description_chars":5351,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":10,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Commerce","Marketplaces","Digital Government"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-20T10:24:50Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":73,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.814,"p_room":0.9,"age_days":14,"expected_fill_days":31,"reasons":["conf:1","win:mid"],"computed_at":"2026-10-22T06:10:10Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/open-network-for-digital-commerce-aidata-architect","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/open-network-for-digital-commerce-aidata-architect.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-22T15:03:07Z","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":14565,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-23T00:00:00Z"}},"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":2047},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=2047"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fopen-network-for-digital-commerce-aidata-architect"},{"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%2Fopen-network-for-digital-commerce-aidata-architect"},{"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%2Fopen-network-for-digital-commerce-aidata-architect"},{"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/open-network-for-digital-commerce-aidata-architect\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fopen-network-for-digital-commerce-aidata-architect"}]}