Associate Director

Designation : Associate Director

Level : L5

Location : Chennai

Experience : 11 to 17 Years

Job Role :

You will be the senior analytics and AI leader for a set of Technology and Media & Communications clients- the person who owns the client relationship, shapes the analytics and AI roadmap, and makes sure it ships into production and moves a business metric.

Clients in these groups are digital-native and run product telemetry, clickstream, ad-impression and subscriber data at billions of rows, and they buy outcomes (net revenue retention, ARPU, ad yield, cost to serve), not dashboards. The role therefore blends three things: a consulting partner who can hold a VP-level conversation, a data science leader who can review a causal model or an LLM evaluation plan, and a P&L owner who grows the account.

You will also build the practice: reusable accelerators, GenAI and agentic solutions for these industries, and a lead and groom reporting members to run accounts independently.

Responsibilities :

Client and account leadership

• Own multiple strategic accounts end to end: relationship, delivery, margin and growth, with Director/VP/CXO stakeholders in product, growth, marketing, revenue operations, finance and similar functions.

• Work with the client & internal teams to build analytics and AI roadmap per account, prioritizing use cases by value, feasibility and data readiness.

• Grow accounts by identifying new problem spaces, writing proposals and SOWs, and converting pilots into multi-year programs.

• Run quarterly business reviews that tie delivered work to client KPIs and documented value.

Solution design and delivery excellence

• Translate ambiguous business problems into analytical framings, solution architectures and delivery plans across analytics, data science, ML engineering and data engineering.

• Collaborate with AI CoE and act as technical co-reviewer on model design, experimentation, causal inference, forecasting and GenAI/LLM solutions; challenge assumptions and validate business logic.

• Ensure models reach production with MLOps discipline: versioning, monitoring, drift detection, retraining and documentation.

• Govern delivery health across onsite–offshore teams: scope, estimates, risk, quality gates, utilisation and gross margin.

GenAI, agentic AI and innovation

• Support teams in design of GenAI use cases such as conversational analytics, sales and support copilots, content tagging and summarisation, and agentic workflows for marketing and customer operations.

• Set standards for LLM evaluation, guardrails, cost-per-query and responsible AI (privacy, bias, IP and content-rights constraints common in media).

• Partner with hyperscaler and platform alliances (AWS, Azure, GCP, Databricks, Snowflake) on joint solutions and go-to-market as needed.

Solution building and thought leadership

• Build reusable accelerators and IP for the industry groups (for example, SaaS churn-and-expansion kit, Media Mix tool kit...).

• Support sales for new logos: discovery workshops, solution demos and orals.

• Publish points of view, speak at industry forums and contribute to analyst briefings.

People leadership

• Lead 25–60 people through Managers and Senior Managers; own hiring, staffing, performance calibration and promotions for the portfolio.

• Develop successors who can independently run an account.

• Build a culture of rigour, client focus and continuous learning, including GenAI upskilling.

Required skills :

10+ years in analytics, data science or AI consulting or a captive analytics/CoE (preferably focused on Tech B2B SaaS or Media & Ent ).

familiarity with at least one cloud (AWS, Azure or GCP) and modern data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery); understanding of MLOps (MLflow, Airflow, CI/CD). • Delivered at least one GenAI/LLM solution beyond proof of concept, including evaluation and guardrails.