Director AI & Data Analytics; IT Product

Position: Director AI & Data Analytics (For an IT Product Company)
Location: Vasanthanagar

Location:

Bengaluru

Job Title:

Director/Senior Director AI & Data Analytics
Budget:  Upto 1.8 Cr (Fixed + Variable, based on experience and fit)

Employment Type:

Full-time
Industry:  B2B SaaS Product Company

About the Role:

We are looking for a visionary Head of AI to lead our AI strategy, product innovation, and engineering execution. This is a leadership role for someone who has successfully built and scaled AI products from concept to production while growing high-performing AI organizations from the ground up.
The ideal candidate has experience building AI-first SaaS products, defining long-term AI roadmaps, hiring and mentoring world-class AI talent, and scaling teams from 10 to 100+ members. You will work closely with Product, Engineering, Sales, Customer Success, and Executive Leadership to embed AI into the company's core product offerings.

Key Responsibilities:

AI Strategy & Leadership
Define and own the company's AI vision, strategy, and execution roadmap.
Drive AI adoption across all product lines and business functions.
Identify new AI opportunities aligned with customer needs and business goals.
Build a culture of innovation, experimentation, and engineering excellence.
AI Product Development
Lead the design, development, and deployment of AI-powered SaaS products.
Build intelligent features leveraging:
Generative AI
Large Language Models (LLMs)
AI Agents & Agentic Workflows
Machine Learning & Deep Learning
NLP
Recommendation Systems
Predictive Analytics
Computer Vision (where applicable)
Ensure production-grade AI systems with strong scalability, reliability, security, and observability.
Own the end-to-end AI product lifecycle-from ideation to production and continuous improvement.
Team Building & Organizational Leadership
Build, scale, and lead an AI organization from  10 to 100+ professionals , including:
AI Engineers
ML Engineers
Data Scientists
MLOps Engineers
Applied Scientists
Data Engineers
AI Product Managers
Hire, mentor, and retain top AI talent.
Establish engineering standards, performance metrics, and career development frameworks.
Foster cross-functional collaboration between AI, Product, Engineering, and Business teams.
Technical Leadership
Architect scalable AI platforms and ML infrastructure.
Establish best practices around:
MLOps
Model lifecycle management
Model evaluation and monitoring
Data governance
Responsible AI
AI Security
AI Observability
Drive adoption of cloud-native AI architectures.
Business & Customer Impact
Partner with Product and GTM teams to define AI-driven product strategy.
Translate customer problems into scalable AI solutions.
Present AI vision and product roadmap to executive leadership, customers, investors, and partners.
Measure business impact through AI adoption, customer value, and revenue growth.
Required Skills & Experience

Experience
15-20+ years of overall experience in Software Engineering, Data Science, and AI.
8-10+ years of experience leading AI/ML organizations.
Proven experience building and launching AI-powered products in a  B2B SaaS product company .
Demonstrated success in scaling AI teams from  10 to 100+ members .
Strong experience managing multiple engineering managers and senior technical leaders.
Experience working with global product teams and enterprise customers.

Technical Expertise:

AI & Machine Learning
Generative AI
Large Language Models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Llama, etc.)
Agentic AI / Autonomous Agents
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
Fine-tuning & Prompt Engineering
NLP
Deep Learning
Reinforcement Learning (good to have)
AI Frameworks
Lang Chain
Lang Graph
Llama Index
Auto Gen
CrewAI
Semantic Kernel
MCP (Model Context Protocol)
Machine Learning
Tensor Flow
Py Torch
Scikit-learn
XGBoost
Programming
Python (mandatory)
SQL
Java/Scala/Go (good to have)
Cloud & Infrastructure
Azure
AWS
GCP
Kubernetes
Docker
MLOps
MLflow
Kubeflow
Airflow
Weights & Biases
Vector Databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus, FAISS)
Data
Spark
Kafka
Snowflake
Databricks
Big Query (good to have)
Leadership Competencies
Exceptional people leadership and coaching skills.
Proven experience building organizations from scratch.
Strategic thinker with strong execution capability.
Ability to influence C-level executives and cross-functional stakeholders.
Strong customer-first mindset.
Excellent communication and presentation skills.
Comfortable operating in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.

Preferred Qualifications
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
Master's or Ph.D. in AI, Machine Learning, Computer Science, or Data Science preferred.
Publications, patents, or open-source contributions in AI are a plus.
Experience building AI platforms serving enterprise-scale SaaS customers.
Success Metrics
Successfully build and scale a high-performing AI organization from 10 to 100+ members.
Deliver AI-powered product capabilities that drive measurable customer adoption and business growth.
Improve AI platform scalability, reliability, and deployment velocity.
Establish a mature AI engineering and MLOps practice.
Position the company as an AI-first…