We're seeking a Head of Machine Learning to own and scale the ML function at Prodigal. This is the senior-most ML role in the company — partnering directly with the CTO as a peer technical leader, defining the multi-year ML vision, building and leading a world-class team, and translating cutting-edge research into production systems that move the needle for over 100 customers and millions of consumers. You'll set the bar for technical excellence, hire and develop the next generation of ML leaders, and shape what consumer finance intelligence looks like over the next decade. If you've operated at this level before — or are ready to step into it at a company where ML is the engine of the product — we want to talk.

Responsibilities:

• Own the ML function end-to-end — vision, roadmap, team, delivery, and measurable business impact across classical ML, NLP, GenAI, and Agentic AI
• Partner with the CTO as the senior ML leader to set company-wide technical direction and shape the long-term roadmap for Prodigal's Intelligence Engine
• Build and lead a high-performing ML organization — hire, mentor, and develop ML engineers, applied scientists, and tech leads across multiple pods
• Translate research into product — drive the application of LLMs, Agentic AI, the modern NLP stack, recommendation systems, and classical ML into production systems serving 100+ customers
• Set technical standards for model development, deployment, monitoring, evaluation, and experimentation that scale across the org
• Architect data and ML infrastructure in partnership with the platform and engineering teams to support large-scale training and reliable, low-latency inference
• Communicate strategy and outcomes clearly to the founders, board, customers, and broader engineering organization
• Represent Prodigal externally — at conferences, in research collaborations, and as a senior voice in the consumer finance AI community
• Stay at the frontier of ML and GenAI research, identifying where new techniques unlock product and business advantage
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, engineering, GTM, and customer success leaders to ensure ML investment ties directly to revenue, retention, and customer outcomes

Requirements:

• 10+ years of experience in machine learning and software development at a tech or product company, with 4+ years leading ML teams (managing engineers and/or tech leads)
• Proven track record of shipping ML products in production at scale with measurable business impact
• Deep technical fluency across classical ML, deep learning, and the modern NLP/LLM stack — you can still go deep in design reviews, not just review at the surface
• Strong coding skills in Python. Hands-on with PyTorch, scikit-learn, Pandas, and Spark
• Demonstrated success hiring, mentoring, and growing ML talent — including team leads and senior engineers
• Strong executive communication and the ability to set technical direction with founders, peers, and the board
• A bias for outcomes — you connect model work to revenue, engagement, and operational metrics

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience as a founding ML hire, ML lead, or applied science leader at a high-growth AI/ML product company
• Background in voice AI, conversational AI, speech, NLP on unstructured text, or fintech/lending domains
• Experience with cloud services (AWS), Databricks, and building scalable, distributed systems
• Track record of running A/B testing and experimentation programs at scale
• Patents, publications, or open-source contributions; strong institutional pedigree (IIT, BITS, NIT, IISc)
• Experience scaling an ML org through a hypergrowth phase

Job Benefits

• GenAI at the core – Lead the ML function at a company where AI isn't a feature, it's the product. Shape groundbreaking work that redefines consumer finance intelligence.
• World-class team - You'll get the chance to learn from (and teach) some of the brightest and most skilled people you'll ever meet. Our team members have been part of BCG, Deloitte, EY, Blackstone, Meta, Amazon and are IIT, IIM, BITS alumnus.
• Continuous education - As relentless seekers of knowledge, we sponsor and support any training materials, books, courses, and exam fees for upskilling yourself in areas related to your role - but that's not where it ends. If you make a good case for some extra learning, we're delighted to foot the tab.
• Food at the office – Meals are on us. We won't let your stomach grumble while you hustle.
• Health insurance - Health always comes first. The health of your family is as important to us as it is to you. We offer insurance coverage for both you and your family.
• Flexible schedule - We're not a "clock in, clock out" company. Morning person? Start work while the world's still sleeping. Night owl? Ramp things up while others are winding down. You're fully trusted to create the right conditions for your own personal peak productivity. We only ask that you be available to your teammates for seamless collaboration.
• Generous leave policy - Take all the time you need to recharge your batteries - no cap on vacation here. Because a rested, relaxed, and refreshed mind is a happy and effective mind.
• Recreation & team activities – We regularly indulge in friendly football, table tennis, cooking sessions, and challenge each other to do those extra push-ups or chug that 4th drink (of course, that's Nimbu Pani).

Meet Sangram (Cofounder and CTO) and hear his vision for Prodigal: https://www.youtube.com/embed/FTWlN9fwiIA?feature=shared

About the Role

This is not a traditional engineering role. This is a seat at the table.

You will work directly with Prodigal's CTO across the full breadth of building a frontier AI company — technical roadmap, AI projects, customer conversations, GTM collaboration, hiring, and everything in between. Think of it as an accelerated apprenticeship for a future CTO or technical founder. You will be handed ambiguity, context, and trust — and expected to run with it. Over one year, you will touch more dimensions of company building than most engineers see in a decade.

We are looking for someone in explore mode — technically sharp, intellectually restless, and hungry to understand how great companies are built from the inside.

What You'll Own

AI Projects & Technical Execution

• Lead high-priority AI projects end-to-end — voice AI, LLM reasoning, evaluation frameworks, and agentic systems — from research to production
• Work hands-on with frontier models, prompt engineering, real-time voice pipelines, and PIE, Prodigal's Intelligence Engine powering millions of live consumer finance conversations
• Evaluate emerging AI capabilities and support pragmatic build-vs-integrate decisions alongside the CTO

Strategy, Customers & GTM

• Participate in roadmap discussions, competitive analysis, and translating customer insights into engineering direction
• Join customer conversations and escalations; collaborate with Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success on technical enablement and thought leadership that represents Prodigal at the cutting edge

Hiring, Culture & Operations

• Participate in recruiting — evaluating submissions, interviewing, building assessment frameworks — particularly for campus hiring from premier institutions
• Be a sounding board for architectural decisions, tradeoffs, and team dynamics; help identify gaps before they become problems

What You Bring

• Strong CS fundamentals with hands-on Python and/or TypeScript — you write clean, production-ready code
• 0 to 5 years of experience; in explore mode, not exploit mode — still building, still hungry, not optimizing a narrow lane
• Genuine curiosity about AI — you read papers, build side projects, and form opinions about where the technology is heading
• High bias for action, comfort with ambiguity, and clear communication across engineers, customers, and executives
• A builder's mentality — you've made things that required sustained effort to bring into existence

Even Better

• Hands-on experience with LLMs — prompt engineering, evaluation, fine-tuning, or building LLM-powered applications
• Exposure to voice AI, real-time systems, or agentic architectures
• Considering a Masters in CS or AI, or recently completed one

Why This Role

Compounding Learning at an Uncommon Pace

Most early-career engineers spend years getting depth in one domain. This role gives you breadth and depth simultaneously — AI, product, customers, hiring, company building — all in one year, directly alongside a technical co-founder.

Proximity to the Frontier

Voice AI that reasons, decides, and acts in real-time financial conversations is one of the hardest applied AI problems being worked on right now. You will be building it, not reading about it.

A Blueprint for What You Want to Become

Whether you want to be a CTO, a technical founder, or a world-class AI researcher — this role is designed to accelerate that path. Real ownership, real stakes, increasing responsibility as you demonstrate it.

Job Benefits: 

• World-class team - You'll get the chance to learn from (and teach) some of the brightest and most skilled people you'll ever meet. Our team members have been part of BCG, Deloitte, EY, Blackstone, Meta, Amazon and are IIT, IIM, BITS alumnus.
• Continuous education - As relentless seekers of knowledge, we sponsor and support any training materials, books, courses, and exam fees for upskilling yourself in areas related to your role - but that's not where it ends. If you make a good case for some extra learning, we're delighted to foot the tab.
• Food at the office – Meals are on us. We won't let your stomach grumble while you hustle.
• Health insurance - Health always comes first. The health of your family is as important to us, as it is to you. We offer insurance coverage for both you and your family.
• Flexible schedule - We're not a "clock in, clock out" company. Morning person? Start work while the world's still sleeping. Night owl? Ramp things up while others are winding down. You're fully trusted to create the right conditions for your own personal peak productivity. We only ask that you be available to your teammates for seamless collaboration.
• Generous leave policy - Take all the time you need to recharge your batteries - no cap on vacation allowance here. Because a rested, relaxed, and refreshed mind is a happy and effective mind.
• Recreation & team activities – We regularly indulge in friendly football, table tennis, cooking sessions and challenge each other to do those extra push ups or chug that 4^th drink (of course that’s Nimbu Pani)

Meet Sangram - (Cofounder and CTO) and hear his vision for Prodigal below (01:38)

The Role

This is one of the most critical and demanding roles at Prodigal.

As an AI Deployment Lead, you are the person who takes an AI agent from a signed contract to a live, performing system and then keeps it getting better. You sit at the intersection of customer understanding, technical depth, and operational rigor. You own the outcome.

You will work directly with our North American customers - debt collection agencies, lenders, and loan servicers, to understand how their businesses actually run: their call flows, agent scripts/talk-tracks, compliance constraints, telephony/ dialer infrastructure, payment gateways, CRM systems, and APIs. You will translate that understanding into precise requirements and make sure what gets built is right before it ever touches a live call in production.

This is not a project management role with a technical veneer. You will design how the agent should think, speak, and behave across every scenario, validate that it does, and push for refinements until the system performs at the level the customer and you expect.

If you want to understand how enterprise AI actually gets deployed at scale, not in theory but in production, this is that role.

What You'll Own

Customer Discovery and Scoping

• Deeply understand each customer's business and existing call workflows.
• Map their full tech stack: telephony dialer, payment processors, portals, CRMs, and the APIs connecting them
• Design call flow diagrams and interaction maps that translate customer workflows into precise agent behaviours
• Translate complex, sometimes ambiguous requirements into clear, actionable scopes for engineering

Deployment and Phased Delivery

• Own end-to-end delivery across multiple deployment phases
• Manage 4 to 6 concurrent deployments with strong project governance, clear milestones, and zero surprises for the customer
• Drive all customer-facing calls, from kickoff through go-live, with clarity, confidence, and follow-through

Agent Validation and Performance

• Design comprehensive scenarios covering happy paths, edge cases and adversarial situations to ensure the agent is production-ready
• Conduct test calls alongside Agent Engineers to evaluate agent performance across real-world conditions
• Own the feedback loop: test → identify gaps → brief the Agent Engineer → retest → validate and approve

Post-Go-Live Ownership

• Stay close after launch: track agent KPIs, surface performance issues, manage post-production bugs, and drive continuous improvement
• Lead phased expansion, each new capability is a new deployment with its own scoping, testing, and go-live cycle
• Serve as the primary escalation point until the deployment reaches a stable, handoff-ready state

Stakeholder Management

• Navigate multi-stakeholder customer environments: CXOs, Operations, Compliance, IT, and Tech teams, each with different priorities and vocabularies
• Be the person customers trust - responsive, on top of every commitment, and always a step ahead
• Internally, work across functions to unblock delivery and represent the customer's reality

Who You Are

• 2+ years of work experience in B2B SaaS, consulting, digital transformation, or technical deployments/ implementations
• Experience deploying or managing voice AI agents, conversational AI, or automation systems is a strong plus
• Familiarity with the US consumer finance or debt collections industry is a plus, not a requirement
• You understand how APIs work, can read a basic integration spec, and can hold a credible technical conversation without being an engineer
• You're the kind of person who anticipates problems before they surface and builds for them
• Strong communicator, equally comfortable presenting to a CXO and working through an escalation path with an engineer
• You thrive in ambiguity and figure things out without waiting to be told how. This role comes with high ownership and low hand-holding by design
• You'll report to the Head of Customer Success and Deployments
• You'll be joining a growing deployment team
• Experience working with or for North American customers is preferred

What You'll Learn

• How to take AI agents from demo to production in one of the most regulated, high-stakes industries in the US
• How to design and validate AI systems that are safe, compliant, measurable, and commercially meaningful
• How enterprise telephony, payment infrastructure, and compliance requirements shape what AI can and cannot do in the real world
• How to operate at the intersection of product, AI, and mission-critical customer communication

What You’ll Do

• Build and deploy LLM-powered AI agents (including voice agents) in production, designed for real-world use cases
• Own the end-to-end lifecycle of AI systems — from problem scoping and design to deployment, monitoring, and continuous iteration
• Design and optimize prompts, RAG pipelines, and evaluation frameworks to improve accuracy, latency, and reliability
• Work directly with customers and Implementation Managers (IMs) to understand workflows, solve real-world problems, and drive successful go-lives and iterations 

What We’re Looking For

• 1–3 years experience in backend / data / AI engineering
• Strong in Python + SQL
• Experience or exposure to LLMs, RAG, or prompt engineering
• High ownership, ability to work in ambiguity and ship fast
• Comfortable working with customers and cross-functional teams

Preferred Qualification

• B.Tech, BE, or M.Tech in Computer Science or a related discipline, with 1–3 years of relevant experience

Bonus

• Experience with production LLM systems / AI agents
• Familiarity with evaluation, agent tooling, or voice AI
• Experience with Databricks, MongoDB, or distributed systems
• Startup or customer-facing engineering experience

Why This Role

• Work on real production AI systems (not demos)
• End-to-end ownership and fast iteration cycles
• Direct impact on enterprise customers and business outcomes

Mode of Work - In-Office

We're seeking a Machine Learning Lead to join our team in building cutting-edge products that shape the future of consumer finance. As a member of our team, you will oversee complex technical problems, build new features, and improve existing products. Our teams are constantly pushing the boundaries of applied intelligence in consumer finance, and we're looking for passionate individuals who can help us advance us further. If you're interested in leading a world-class team of engineers and researchers to work on exciting projects that have a significant impact, we encourage you to apply.

Responsibilities:

• Partner with the CTO to drive the team's goals and technical direction to pursue opportunities that make the organization more efficient
• Effectively communicate complex features and systems in detail
• Understand industry & company-wide trends to help assess & develop new technologies
• Partner with the CTO to lead long-term technical vision and roadmap for Machine Learning and the entire organization
• Suggest, collect, and synthesize requirements and create an effective feature roadmap
• Design and develop Machine learning products and services leveraging AI (LLMs, Agentic AI, classical ML, the modern NLP stack, etc)
• Architect and implement data pipelines for ML model training. Lead scalable software systems development to deploy ML models into production systems, ensuring high performance and reliability.
• Stay updated on ML research and the ever-changing Gen AI landscape, identifying opportunities for innovation.
•  Effectively collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver high-quality solutions on time. Guide team members in contributing to ML design discussions for new projects.

Requirements:

• Extensive experience, 5+ years in software development, with a focus on machine learning and data science in a tech company. 
• Proven track record of delivering high-quality ML products in a fast-paced, agile environment.
• Deep understanding of machine learning algorithms with hands-on experience in developing and deploying machine learning models at scale.
• Strong coding skills in Python. Familiarity with machine learning libraries such as PyTorch and sci-kit-learn. Experience with data manipulation and analysis tools like Pandas and Spark.
• Strong communication and leadership skills, with the ability to effectively collaborate with cross-functional teams and mentor junior engineers.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with cloud services (AWS), Databricks, and building scalable, distributed systems.

Job Benefits 

• GenAI experience – Work directly in the innovative field of GenAI, shaping groundbreaking projects that redefine consumer finance intelligence.
• World-class team - You'll get the chance to learn from (and teach) some of the brightest and most skilled people you'll ever meet. Our team members have been part of BCG, Deloitte, EY, Blackstone, Meta, Amazon and are IIT, IIM, BITS alumnus.
• Continuous education - As relentless seekers of knowledge, we sponsor and support any training materials, books, courses, and exam fees for upskilling yourself in areas related to your role - but that's not where it ends. If you make a good case for some extra learning, we're delighted to foot the tab.
• Food at the office – Meals are on us. We won't let your stomach grumble while you hustle.
• Health insurance - Health always comes first. The health of your family is as important to us as it is to you. We offer insurance coverage for both you and your family.
• Flexible schedule - We're not a "clock in, clock out" company. Morning person? Start work while the world's still sleeping. Night owl? Ramp things up while others are winding down. You're fully trusted to create the right conditions for your own personal peak productivity. We only ask that you be available to your teammates for seamless collaboration.
• Generous leave policy - Take all the time you need to recharge your batteries - no cap on vacation here. Because a rested, relaxed, and refreshed mind is a happy and effective mind.
• Recreation & team activities – We regularly indulge in friendly football, table tennis, cooking sessions, and challenge each other to do those extra push-ups or chug that 4th drink (of course, that’s Nimbu Pani).

Meet Sangram - (Cofounder and CTO) and hear his vision for Prodigal below (01:38)

We are building PIE (Prodigal Intelligence Engine) - the specialized intelligence layer that transforms AI agents from conversational interfaces into truly intelligent decision-makers. We're building the brain that makes agents understand context, make compliant decisions, and deliver personalized experiences at scale. Read more about PIE here

About the role

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Platform team, you'll architect the systems that power PIE - unifying siloed data sources across CRMs, lending systems, dialers, and communication channels into a unified intelligence layer. You're building infrastructure that doesn't just handle data at scale, but extracts meaning from it, enabling AI agents to make contextually intelligent, compliant decisions in real-time.

This isn't incremental improvement - it's foundational work toward an agentic future where specialized AI agents collaborate autonomously to manage entire collections operations. The systems you build today become the backbone of tomorrow's agentic workforce.

What you'll do

• Design and build the distributed systems infrastructure that powers PIE, processing millions of consumer interactions daily while maintaining sub-100ms response times for real-time agent decision-making
• Build robust data unification pipelines that reconcile and synthesize information across heterogeneous systems (CRMs, LMS platforms, dialers, communication channels) into coherent, actionable intelligence
• Create scalable platforms that can ingest, process, and serve insights from 500+ consumer attributes while supporting complex regulatory and compliance requirements
• Own end-to-end architecture and implementation - from high-level system design through production deployment and operational excellence
• Write production-grade code in Python, Golang, and Node.js that balances performance, maintainability, and speed of iteration
• Conduct rigorous code reviews, tackle complex distributed systems bugs, and take ownership of high-risk technical challenges
• Build comprehensive testing strategies spanning unit, integration, and regression capabilities to ensure reliability at scale
• Implement sophisticated monitoring, observability, and troubleshooting capabilities for complex distributed systems
• Drive improvements in key technical metrics: system availability, data freshness, query performance, and cost efficiency
• Partner with ML teams to build infrastructure that supports model training, inference, and continuous learning loops
• Influence technical direction and architectural decisions that span multiple teams and projects
• Mentor junior engineers through code reviews, architectural discussions, and collaborative problem-solving
• Champion engineering best practices, documentation standards, and operational excellence across the platform team

✅ Requirements

• B.Tech./BE/M.Tech Equivalent in Computer Science or relevant education
• 4+ years architecting and building high-throughput, distributed data platforms that process millions of events daily
• Strong hands-on expertise with NoSQL & SQL databases (MongoDB, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL) and modern data warehouses (Redshift, Snowflake, Databricks BigQuery)
• Deep experience building scalable, secure, highly available software that operates reliably under production load
• Proficiency with AWS services, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and modern DevOps practices
• Expertise in observability and monitoring tools (Sentry, CloudWatch, Prometheus, ELK) for troubleshooting production systems
• Strong expertise in troubleshooting complex production issues.
• Good problem solving, critical thinking, and communication skills. Should be able to find the right balance between perfection and speed of execution
• Self-starter and self-learner, who never settles
• Comfortable working in a fast paced environment while continuously evaluating emerging technologies
• Bonus: Foundational knowledge of Machine Learning and AI systems - understanding how models are trained, served, and integrated into production applications
• Bonus: Experience building platforms that power real-time AI/ML workloads or agentic systems

⚙️ Our Tech Stack

• Languages & Frameworks: Python, Golang, Node.js
• Databases: MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Databricks
• Infrastructure: AWS (EKS, EC2, Lambda), Kubernetes, Docker
• GenAI Tooling: Cursor, Claude code, and all other leading AI dev tools 

Mode of Work - In-Office (Powai, Mumbai)

What we offer

• GenAI experience – Work directly in the innovative field of GenAI, shaping groundbreaking projects that redefine consumer finance intelligence.
• World-class team - You'll get the chance to learn from (and teach) some of the brightest and most skilled people you'll ever meet. Our team members have been part of BCG, Deloitte, EY, Blackstone, Meta, Amazon and are IIT, IIM, BITS alumnus.
• Continuous education - As relentless seekers of knowledge, we sponsor and support any training materials, books, courses, and exam fees for upskilling yourself in areas related to your role - but that's not where it ends. If you make a good case for some extra learning, we're delighted to foot the tab.
• Food at the office – Meals are on us. We won't let your stomach grumble while you hustle.
• Health insurance - Health always comes first. The health of your family is as important to us, as it is to you. We offer insurance coverage for both you and your family.
• Flexible schedule - We're not a "clock in, clock out" company. Morning person? Start work while the world's still sleeping. Night owl? Ramp things up while others are winding down. You're fully trusted to create the right conditions for your own personal peak productivity. We only ask that you be available to your teammates for seamless collaboration.
• Generous leave policy - Take all the time you need to recharge your batteries - no cap on vacation here. Because a rested, relaxed, and refreshed mind is a happy and effective mind.
• Recreation & team activities – We regularly indulge in friendly football, table tennis, cooking sessions and challenge each other to do those extra push ups or chug that 4th drink (of course that’s Nimbu Pani).