AI Engineer — Iris 8 AI Labs

About Iris 8

Organisations are renting AI from frontier labs. Their data leaves the building, costs keep climbing, and they own nothing they pay to improve. Iris 8 changes that. We build sovereign AI: private, specialist models trained on an organisation's own data, running inside its own perimeter, with every request routed to the smallest model that gets the job done.

We're founded by repeat founders. Our CEO previously built Lending (acquired for $140M+), co-founded multiple AI platforms serving 140+ financial institutions.

About the role

You'll be one of our first engineers, owning problems end to end, from training a model to getting it running in production inside a customer's workplace. You'll work directly with the founders and our customers, and help define how Iris 8 builds and ships.

What you'll do

- Fine-tune and evaluate small, specialist language models on customer data
- Build our routing layer that sends each request to the smallest capable model
- Deploy and operate models inside customer environments: on-prem, private cloud and air-gapped
- Design evaluation frameworks that prove accuracy, cost and safety to regulated customers
- Work hands-on with customer teams to turn real workflows into production AI
- Turn what you learn from each deployment into repeatable product

You may be a good fit if you




- Have shipped LLM-powered systems to production, not just prototypes
- Are strong in Python and comfortable across the stack, from training to inference to infrastructure
- Have experience with fine-tuning (LoRA, distillation or similar) and open-weight models
- Know inference serving (vLLM, TGI or similar), quantization, and GPU cost trade-offs
- Pick up whatever you're missing to get the job done
- Can explain technical decisions clearly to non-technical customers
- Have 6–8 years of engineering experience, including hands-on work with ML or LLM systems
- Have a background in AI R&D;: training, fine-tuning or evaluating models, and turning research into production

Nice to have

- Experience in regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare or government
- Background in MLOps, Kubernetes, or security and compliance
- Former founders and early-stage engineers: we'd love to hear from you

Why join

- Ground floor at a company built by founders who have done it before
- Real ownership and meaningful equity
- Hard problems: frontier-quality AI at a fraction of the cost, inside the world's most regulated environments

How to apply

- Send your resume, plus a link to something you've built, to [email protected], or apply here on LinkedIn.

📌 AI Engineer (Pune)
🏢 IRIS8
📍 Pune