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Principal Architect AI Data Engineer

EXL

Posted 24 Jun 2026

PuneHigh payGreat Place to Work
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Key Responsibilities

Architecture & Solution Leadership

  • Lead the design of enterprise-grade GenAI and agentic architectures (single-agent, multi-agent, tool-driven systems).
  • Define reference architectures, reusable frameworks, and best practices for LLM applications across the organisation.
  • Architect and oversee implementation of end-to-end RAG pipelines
    • Data ingestion → chunking → embeddings → vector search → orchestration → response synthesis.
  • Drive scalability, reliability, cost optimisation, and performance across GenAI platforms.

Agentic & LLM Engineering (Hands-on + Oversight)

  • Provide technical leadership in prompt engineering, prompt orchestration, and agent workflows (LangChain, LangGraph, etc.).
  • Guide teams on tool-calling, function-calling, memory handling, and multi-agent system design.
  • Lead efforts in hallucination reduction, guardrails, safety mechanisms, and output evaluation frameworks.

Platform & Engineering Excellence

  • Architect production-grade APIs and services (FastAPI/Flask/enterprise microservices) for LLM solutions.
  • Define MLOps / LLMOps pipelines including CI/CD, monitoring, observability, and evaluation.
  • Partner with Data Engineering teams to ensure: 
    • Data quality, lineage, governance, and compliance
    • Seamless integration with enterprise data platforms
 

Organisation-Level Responsibilities (Critical)

Capability Building & CoE Development

  • Build and scale GenAI / Agentic AI Centre of Excellence (CoE).
  • Define standardised frameworks, accelerators, and reusable components to improve delivery velocity.
  • Drive organisation-wide adoption of GenAI best practices and tooling standards.

Strategic & Stakeholder Leadership

  • Engage with CXOs, business stakeholders, and clients to translate business problems into AI-led solutions.
  • Lead solutioning, pre-sales, RFP responses, and client workshops for GenAI opportunities.
  • Influence AI strategy, roadmap, and investment decisions at organisational level.

Governance, Risk & Compliance

  • Establish enterprise governance frameworks for GenAI: 
    • Responsible AI, security, privacy, ethical usage, and compliance
  • Define policies for: 
    • Data access, redaction, model usage, auditability, and explainability

Mentorship & Team Leadership

  • Mentor and guide architects, engineers, and data scientists.
  • Drive technical upskilling, hiring strategy, and capability maturity.
  • Review solution designs and enforce architecture quality standards.
 

Experience & Must-Have Skills

Experience

  • 15+ years of total experience in Data Engineering / Data Science / AI
  • 3+ years of hands-on experience in LLM / GenAI solutions at scale
  • Proven experience in architecture, solution design, and enterprise delivery
 

LLM / GenAI & Agentic Engineering

  • Strong hands-on experience with:
    • LLMs (Claude, OpenAI, etc.)
    • RAG pipelines and retrieval optimisation
    • GPT + Agentic AI implementation experience
  • Experience with:
    • LangChain, LangGraph, or similar frameworks
    • Agent orchestration and tool-calling architectures
  • Deep understanding of:
    • LLM limitations, evaluation, and optimisation strategies
 

Core Engineering

  • Strong Python/Pyspark engineering expertise (production-grade development) with proven API integration experience
  • Deep data analysis experience and handling large volume of data
  • Fabric/Azure Databricks/Snowflake data engineering integration skills
  • Good exposure to:
    • Cloud platforms (Azure/AWS/GCP)
    • SQL
    • Containers, CI/CD, monitoring
 

Data / AI Foundations (Mandatory)

Prior experience in one or more:

  • Data Engineering (ETL/ELT, pipelines, orchestration)
  • Data Science / ML lifecycle (especially NLP)

Analytics engineering / data products

 

Good-to-Have / Preferred

  • Fine-tuning techniques (LoRA, PEFT, prompt tuning, few-shot learning)
  • Experience with enterprise GenAI deployments (security, privacy, governance)
  • Experience with Azure ecosystem (Azure OpenAI, AI Search, Fabric, etc.)
  • Exposure to industry use cases (Insurance, BFSI, Healthcare, Retail, etc.)