Senior Applied AI / LLM Engineer
Compensation: ₹8L – ₹12L • No equity
We are looking for someone who can design and build the intelligence layer powering our next-generation education platform.
You will work across LLMs, RAG, AI agents, model routing, personalization, evaluation, AI infrastructure, and ML/data intelligence.
This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who wants to build production-grade AI systems rather than simply integrate APIs.
You will own important architectural decisions and help create AI systems that are scalable, cost-efficient, reliable, personalized, and flexible across multiple foundation-model providers.
Requirements
- Strong understanding of LLM application architecture and modern Generative AI systems
- Hands-on experience with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, or other foundation-model APIs
- Experience building production applications using LLMs, structured outputs, tool/function calling, and prompt/system design
- Strong understanding of RAG architectures, embeddings, vector databases, semantic search, hybrid search, chunking, reranking, and retrieval pipelines
- Experience designing AI orchestration, model routing, context management, and multi-step AI workflows
- Strong Python programming and software engineering fundamentals
- Understanding of APIs, asynchronous processing, databases, caching, queues, and scalable backend systems
- Ability to evaluate AI systems based on quality, accuracy, latency, reliability, token usage, scalability, and cost
- Understanding of AI evaluation, hallucination detection, grounding, output validation, and reliability mechanisms
- Ability to design systems that remain flexible as models, providers, requirements, and product usage evolve
- Strong understanding of when to use LLMs and when deterministic code, databases, search, rules, or traditional ML would be more appropriate
- Ability to make engineering trade-offs and choose the simplest reliable architecture for a given problem
Responsibilities
- Design and own Novevex's AI architecture across LLM integration, AI orchestration, model routing, context management, RAG, vector search, knowledge systems, AI agents, personalization, evaluation, safety, reliability, and observability
- Build production-grade AI applications on top of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, and other suitable foundation models
- Design vendor-flexible model architectures that allow Novevex to switch between models and providers without redesigning the entire platform
- Evaluate and select models based on quality, capability, latency, reliability, token usage, infrastructure requirements, and cost
- Design cost-effective AI architectures using techniques such as model routing, caching, retrieval, batching, precomputation, and appropriate model selection
- Build scalable AI systems capable of supporting growth from hundreds of students to hundreds of thousands or millions of users
- Design and implement RAG and knowledge-intelligence systems including document ingestion, chunking, embeddings, vector search, hybrid retrieval, metadata filtering, reranking, grounding, and context pipelines
- Build personalized AI experiences using student profiles, class, board, subject, chapter, topic, performance, learning history, previous interactions, weaknesses, and current learning objectives
- Develop intelligent AI workflows that combine student context, academic knowledge, retrieval, model selection, generation, validation, and personalization
- Build AI evaluation pipelines to measure correctness, relevance, hallucination, grounding, consistency, explanation quality, question quality, difficulty, and structured-output validity
- Implement reliability mechanisms including validation, guardrails, fallback models, error handling, monitoring, and quality checks
- Design AI observability systems to monitor model performance, latency, token consumption, costs, failures, and user-level outcomes
- Work with student-performance data and help design the interface between LLM-based intelligence and future ML/data-science systems
- Collaborate with backend, product, and data teams to integrate AI capabilities into the broader Novevex platform
- Continuously research and evaluate new AI models, frameworks, architectures, and techniques that can create meaningful product advantages
- Make architecture decisions based on business requirements, expected scale, reliability, maintainability, performance, and cost rather than technology trends alone
Technical Skills
Required
LLM / Generative AI
- OpenAI / Anthropic / Gemini APIs
- LLM application architecture
- Context engineering
- Structured outputs
- Tool/function calling
- Prompt/system design
- Model evaluation
RAG / Retrieval
- Embeddings
- Vector databases
- Semantic search
- Hybrid search
- Metadata filtering
- Reranking
- Document pipelines
AI Engineering
- Python
- API development
- Asynchronous workflows
- Caching
- Retries/fallbacks
- Observability
- Performance optimization
Architecture
- Scalable system design
- API/service architecture
- Cloud infrastructure concepts
- Distributed systems fundamentals
- Security and reliability
- Cost optimization
Strongly Preferred
- AI agents / agentic workflows
- Multimodal AI
- Recommendation systems
- Personalization engines
- Knowledge graphs / concept graphs
- ML fundamentals
- Model routing
- Inference optimization
- AI experimentation
- Evaluation frameworks
- Production AI systems
What We Are Not Looking For
- A prompt engineer who only writes prompts
- Someone who only connects an LLM API
- An academic ML researcher who only wants to train models
- Someone focused on building a foundation LLM
- Someone who chooses technology based only on popularity
- Someone who ignores API/infrastructure cost
- Someone who builds a demo but cannot design a production system