Lead Data Scientist

This role is for one of Weekday’s clients
Salary range: Rs 1000000 – Rs 2000000 (ie INR 10-20 LPA)
Min Experience: 7 years
Location: Bengaluru
JobType: full-time

Requirements

About the Role:
We are seeking a Lead Data Scientist with deep expertise in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLMs) to drive advanced AI solutions and lead a team of data scientists and ML engineers. This is a unique opportunity to work on cutting-edge machine learning projects, influence product direction, and shape the company’s data strategy. The ideal candidate is both a strategic thinker and a hands-on practitioner with strong experience in Python, end-to-end ML development, and leading teams.

As a Lead Data Scientist, you will work closely with cross-functional teams including engineering, product, and business stakeholders to develop intelligent systems that create significant business impact.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead and mentor a team of data scientists to develop and deploy ML models, particularly in NLP, generative AI, and LLMs (e.g., GPT, BERT, LLaMA).
• Design, build, and implement end-to-end machine learning pipelines, from data preprocessing to production deployment.
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams to identify and scope machine learning opportunities aligned with business goals.
• Apply advanced NLP techniques (entity recognition, sentiment analysis, text summarization, etc.) to extract insights from unstructured data sources.
• Evaluate, fine-tune, and deploy large-scale language models for real-world applications such as chatbots, recommendation engines, document understanding, and automated decision systems.
• Drive innovation in data science methodologies and stay up to date with recent advancements in LLMs and generative AI.
• Conduct code reviews, set best practices for experimentation and model evaluation, and ensure model reproducibility and interpretability.
• Contribute to architectural decisions around model serving, feature engineering, and infrastructure.
• Communicate technical findings clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Required Skills & Qualifications:

• 7+ years of hands-on experience in data science, with at least 3 years in a leadership or technical mentorship role.
• Expertise in Python and its data/ML ecosystem (NumPy, pandas, scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch, etc.).
• Proven experience in Natural Language Processing, including practical use of transformers, LLMs, and fine-tuning of pre-trained models.
• Strong grasp of ML theory and statistical modeling.
• Experience building and deploying machine learning models in production environments.
• Ability to lead projects from ideation to delivery in fast-paced, collaborative environments.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Bachelor’s/Master’s/PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, or related field.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, FAISS), RAG pipelines, and prompt engineering.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and MLOps tools (MLflow, Kubeflow, etc.).
• Publications or contributions to open-source projects in ML or NLP.