Data Science Lead
First seen by Alion on Sep 22, 2026.
Role Overview :
Lead the end-to-end design, development, and deployment of AI/ML solutions across LLM, VLM, computer vision, and traditional ML domains.
Key Responsibilities :
- Define and own the AI/ML technical architecture - model pipelines, training infrastructure, feature stores, and serving systems.
- Build and fine-tune Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for domain-specific applications (e.g., RAG, agents, multimodal understanding).
- Design and deploy production-grade computer vision systems (object detection, segmentation, OCR, video analytics) at scale.
- Develop and maintain classical ML models (regression, classification, clustering, time-series forecasting, recommendation engines) where appropriate.
- Architect scalable, low-latency model serving infrastructure for both batch and real-time inference workloads.
- Establish best practices for experiment tracking, model versioning, A/B testing, reproducibility, and documentation across the team.
- Mentor and technically lead a team of data scientists and ML engineers; conduct architecture reviews, design discussions, and code reviews.
- Collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, and Business teams to translate complex business problems into well-defined AI solutions.
- Evaluate and integrate emerging AI technologies, frameworks, and research papers into the product roadmap.
- Champion responsible AI - fairness, bias detection, explainability, and compliance with data privacy regulations.
- Communicate technical strategies, trade-offs, and results to senior leadership and non-technical stakeholders.
Required Qualifications :
- 8+ years of hands-on experience in data science, machine learning, or AI engineering, with at least 2 - 3 years in a tech lead or senior IC capacity.
- Deep expertise in LLMs - fine-tuning (LoRA, QLoRA, PEFT), prompt engineering, RAG pipelines, embedding models, and LLM evaluation frameworks.
- Strong hands-on experience with Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as LLaVA, GPT-4V, Gemini, or similar multimodal architectures.
- Proven track record in computer vision - CNNs, transformers (ViT, DETR, SAM), object detection (YOLO, Faster R-CNN), segmentation, OCR, and video understanding.
- Solid command of classical ML techniques - ensemble methods, gradient boosting (XGBoost, LightGBM), Bayesian methods, and time-series modeling.
- Strong proficiency in Python and ML/DL frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face Transformers, LangChain, or equivalent).
- Production ML experience - building, deploying, and monitoring models in real-world systems with SLA requirements.
- Solid understanding of ML system architecture - feature engineering pipelines, model registries, CI/CD for ML, containerized deployments (Docker, Kubernetes).
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and GPU-accelerated training infrastructure.
- Proven ability to lead cross-functional technical teams, drive architecture decisions, and deliver projects on time.
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to translate complex AI concepts for diverse audiences.
- Master's or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, or a related quantitative field preferred.
Skills
Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science, Data Scientist, Python, PyTorch, LLM, Computer Vision, Prompt Engineering, GPT, Cloud