We're Hiring: AI/ML Engineer

Vowels of the People Association (VOPA)

Location: Kothrud, Pune (In-Office)

Employment Type: Full-Time

Experience: 0–3 Years (Freshers Welcome)

Salary: Based on demonstrated skills

Apply at: https://careers.vopa.in

About VOPA

Vowels of the People Association (VOPA) is a Pune-based organization working at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and education technology for social impact.

Our flagship product, NIPUN Maharashtra, powers foundational literacy and numeracy assessments across 70,000+ schools in Maharashtra, serving 5 million students.

We build AI that works for underserved populations — real classrooms, real children, real impact.

About The Role

We are looking for a passionate and technically strong AI/ML Engineer to join our team.

This is a hands-on engineering role with a research orientation. You will work on fine-tuning open-source models, designing machine learning pipelines, and deploying production-ready AI systems at scale.

Our Key Focus Areas Include

- Handwritten answer evaluation
- Marathi Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
- Computer Vision for Indic scripts
- Low-resource language AI models
- Efficient cloud and on-device AI inference

What makes this role exciting? We have already shipped a fine-tuned vision model (Gemma 4 31B using Unsloth and LoRA) that surpasses many state-of-the-art models on Marathi children's handwriting recognition. You will build on this foundation, improve existing systems, and explore new approaches to solving challenging AI problems.

Important: This is not a data annotation or prompt engineering role. We are looking for someone who understands how machine learning models work internally.

Key Responsibilities

- Model Fine-Tuning & Training
- Fine-tune open-source LLMs and vision models using LoRA, QLoRA, and other Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques.
- Work with Hugging Face Transformers, Unsloth, and PEFT libraries.
- Optimize GPU training performance and resource utilization.
- Experiment with model architectures for domain-specific educational applications.
- Computer Vision & Speech AI
- Develop models for Marathi handwriting recognition and answer evaluation.
- Work on speech recognition systems for Marathi and other Indic languages.
- Design AI-based rubric scoring and evaluation mechanisms.
- Handle noisy, inconsistent, and low-resource real-world datasets.
- Model Deployment & Optimization
- Deploy fine-tuned models to AWS infrastructure, including ECS/Fargate and GPU inference endpoints.




- Optimize inference performance, latency, throughput, and infrastructure cost.
- Explore quantization, batching, ONNX, TensorRT, and other inference optimization techniques.
- Investigate on-device AI deployment for Android applications.
- ML Pipelines & Evaluation
- Build end-to-end ML pipelines covering data preprocessing, augmentation, training, evaluation, and serving.
- Define and track evaluation metrics such as Word Error Rate (WER), Character Error Rate (CER), and Devanagari-aware benchmarks.
- Perform structured error analysis to identify model weaknesses.
- Improve model reliability and accuracy through systematic experimentation.
- Research & Engineering Collaboration
- Read and evaluate recent AI/ML research papers.
- Translate research ideas into practical experiments and production implementations.
- Collaborate with backend engineers to integrate AI models into FastAPI services.
- Contribute to technical decisions regarding model architecture, training, and deployment.

Required Technical Skills Model Fine-Tuning & Deep Learning

- Strong understanding of Transformer architectures, attention mechanisms, embeddings, and positional encoding.
- Knowledge of encoder, decoder, and encoder-decoder architectures.
- Hands-on experience with LoRA/QLoRA fine-tuning using Hugging Face PEFT or Unsloth.
- Understanding of model quantization techniques such as NF4, GPTQ, and AWQ.
- Familiarity with learning rate scheduling, gradient accumulation, and mixed-precision training.
- Ability to diagnose training instability, loss spikes, and gradient-related issues.

ML Engineering & Programming
- Good programming skills in Python or Rust.
- Proficiency in PyTorch, including autograd, tensor operations, and custom loss functions.
- Experience with Computer Vision (CNNs, image preprocessing, augmentation) and/or Speech AI (CTC, attention-based models, audio feature extraction).
- Understanding of dataset preparation, labeling strategies, and train/validation/test splits.
- Ability to write clean, modular, production-oriented code.

Model Deployment & Inference




- Experience deploying ML models using Docker and cloud infrastructure.
- Familiarity with GPU-based inference environments.
- Understanding of inference optimization, batching, ONNX, TensorRT, and KV caching.
- Awareness of model size, latency, and runtime constraints for edge devices.
- Ability to balance inference cost, latency, and throughput.

Preferred Skills (Not Mandatory)

- Experience using Unsloth for efficient model fine-tuning.
- Familiarity with Marathi, Devanagari, or multilingual NLP/ASR systems.
- Experience working with children's handwriting or speech datasets.
- Knowledge of AWS services such as ECS, S3, CloudFront, and Lambda.
- Exposure to model watermarking, AI model security, or on-device inference protection.

Who Can Apply?

We Welcome Applications From

- Freshers with strong practical AI/ML skills and demonstrable projects.
- Engineers with 0–3 years of relevant experience.
- Candidates who have independently fine-tuned or deployed ML models.
- Individuals who enjoy research, experimentation, and solving real-world engineering challenges.

A Specific Degree Or Certification Is Not Required. We value demonstrated technical skills, problem-solving ability, and hands-on experience over academic credentials.

Our Selection Process

Our hiring process is entirely skill-based.

Candidates will be evaluated through a practical technical assessment designed to test their understanding of AI/ML concepts and their ability to solve real engineering problems.

Degrees and certifications will not determine selection.

What We Offer

- Real-world impact: Build AI systems used across 70,000+ schools, reaching millions of children.
- Meaningful engineering challenges: Work on low-resource languages, handwritten text recognition, speech AI, and edge deployment.
- Technical ownership: Take responsibility for research, development, optimization, and deployment.
- Collaborative environment: Work with a technically robust, mission-driven team.
- Growth opportunities: Contribute to AI research and architectural decisions as VOPA scales.
- High autonomy: We value outcomes, independent thinking, and engineering excellence.

Apply Now Interested in building AI systems that create meaningful educational impact?

Submit Your Application Through Our Official Careers Portal https://careers.vopa.in

Applications are accepted only through the VOPA Careers Portal.

Vowels of the People Association (VOPA)

Building technology for meaningful social impact.

Salary Range

4.00 - 5.00 LPA

📌 AI/ML Engineer (Pune)
🏢 Vowels Of The People Association
📍 Pune