AI Architect

ZEISS in India

ZEISS in India is headquartered in Bengaluru and present in the fields of Industrial Quality Solutions, Research Microscopy Solutions, Medical Technology, Vision Care and Sports & Cine Optics.

ZEISS India has 3 production facilities, R&D center, Global IT services and about 40 Sales & Service offices in almost all Tier I and Tier II cities in India. With 2200+ employees and continued investments over 25 years in India, ZEISS’ success story in India is continuing at a rapid pace.

Further information at ZEISS India.

Duties and responsibilities

• Act as technical product owner and lead engineer for Microsoft-based agentic AI solutions supporting REF program and portfolio management.
• Take over externally and internally developed pilot components, assess their architecture and code quality, industrialize them, and establish sustainable internal ownership, documentation and support.
• Design, build and maintain secure data pipelines and connectors for relevant sources such as Microsoft Teams chats and meeting transcripts, SharePoint, Excel, Jira, Azure DevOps, Smartsheet, eDMS and Polarion.
• Create and maintain a common project fact base that links projects, tasks, milestones, dependencies, resources, decisions, risks, documents and meeting evidence.
• Develop and orchestrate agents for project status reporting, management briefings, evidence-based Q&A, risk and dependency analysis, resource and capability planning, and scenario support.
• Implement grounded retrieval, source attribution, data-quality checks and explicit gap handling so that every material output is transparent and reviewable.
• Use approved Microsoft and Azure capabilities, including Microsoft 365, Teams, Power Platform, Copilot technologies, Azure AI services and Entra ID, in alignment with ZEISS architecture and security standards.
• Implement identity, project-scoped authorization, audit logging, monitoring, model and prompt lifecycle management, testing, release management and incident support.
• Collaborate with ZEISS IT, ZEISS Digital Partners, the MED AI Hub, data owners and tool owners to secure access, clarify interfaces and reuse existing enterprise platforms and components.
• Partner closely with the Global Program Intelligence & Transformation Lead and all R&D projects to translate management questions into reliable technical products and measurable use cases.
• Build reusable engineering patterns, technical documentation, runbooks and knowledge-transfer materials; coach additional engineers as the capability scales.
• Continuously evaluate solution quality, cost, performance, security and user feedback and improve the platform based on evidence.

Authorities

• Recommend technical architecture, engineering standards and release decisions for the REF agentic AI and Portfolio Intelligence solution within approved ZEISS guardrails.
• Approve technical changes and deployments within the delegated product scope and defined change-control process.
• Reject integrations or agent releases that do not meet agreed security, data-quality, traceability or maintainability criteria.
• Coordinate technical work packages with internal teams and approved external engineering partners.

Qualifications

• Graduate degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Software Engineering, Information Systems or a related discipline.
• •Typically 7+ years of hands-on experience in software, cloud or data engineering, including substantial experience designing production-grade AI, analytics or integration solutions.
• Proven experience taking AI, data or software pilots from proof of concept into secure, scalable and sustainably operated production solutions.
• Demonstrated experience with GenAI and agentic AI patterns, including retrieval-augmented generation, tool/function calling, orchestration, evaluation, observability and human-in-the-loop controls.
• Strong practical experience with the Microsoft ecosystem, preferably Azure AI services, Microsoft 365 / Graph integration, Teams, Power Platform, Copilot technologies, Azure DevOps and Entra ID.
• Strong data-engineering skills across APIs, ETL/ELT, SQL and document or semantic retrieval; experience integrating structured and unstructured enterprise data.
• Strong hands-on programming skills for production AI and data integrations (for example, Python), combined with sound software-engineering practices, automated testing, CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code exposure.
• Experience with secure enterprise architecture, access control, auditability, data protection and responsible AI. Experience in regulated industries or MedTech is strongly preferred.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate across India, Germany and global virtual teams.

Success measures

• Stable internal operation and maintainability of the solution.

• Reliable, traceable access to agreed data sources with appropriate authorization and monitoring.

• Accuracy, usefulness and user trust of agent-generated project and portfolio outputs.

• Reduction in manual reporting effort and cycle time for management preparation.

• Reuse of common components and controlled scale-up to additional REF projects and use cases.

Other attributes

We are looking for a hands-on builder and pragmatic problem solver, not only an AI concept expert. The successful candidate combines deep technical curiosity with production discipline, understands that enterprise AI is primarily a data, integration and governance challenge, and can translate an externally accelerated pilot into a robust ZEISS-owned capability. Willingness to learn the MedTech and REF domain is essential.

Direct reports

None initially; the role is expected to lead technical contributors and partners through matrix collaboration. Team build-up may follow based on scaling decisions beyond REF.

Your ZEISS Recruiting Team: