ACSI India is looking for a Lead Data Scientist who will combine strong technical fluency with proven people leadership to build and guide a team of data scientists and AI engineers. You will stay hands-on enough to coach credibly, actively develop the people and capabilities of the team you lead, and partner with technical leads and product on direction and architecture, while collaborating with stakeholders across CAS to develop innovative, data-driven solutions using consultative problem-solving to address complex challenges such as knowledge extraction, classification, search algorithms, and prediction models.

Job Responsibilities

- Own hiring for a growing team: recruiting, interviewing, and evaluating talent.
- Develop, retain, and motivate data scientists and AI engineers with deep scientific domain expertise; shape and build the team.
- Coach and mentor team members across levels, supporting both technical growth and career progression, including hands-on guidance on complex challenges as needed.
- Manage performance and career development in line with the career framework
- Build bench strength, support succession planning, and sustain a healthy, inclusive, high-expectation team culture.
- Match people to work thoughtfully, balancing team delivery with individual growth and job satisfaction.
- Identify, manage, and resolve conflict within the team.

Technical Fluency & Coaching

- Maintain enough fluency across modern AI engineering: LLMs, agentic workflows and tool use, RAG, retrieval and extraction over scientific content, and evaluation — to lead and coach the team credibly.
- Judge the quality of the team’s technical work well enough to give meaningful feedback and guide development.
- Understand the trustworthy-AI principles the team works including CAS’s reliance on curated, provenanced scientific content, and the difference between acceptable model variability and genuine failure — well enough to reinforce them.




- Partner with technical leads and product, who own technical direction, architecture, and roadmap.
- Ensure the team is well-resourced, unblocked, and set up to succeed, working with technical leads and product on prioritization and staffing.
- Remove organizational and people-level obstacles, and escalate and resolve issues that slow the team.
- Support healthy operating practices — delivery rhythm, review, and production health — without owning roadmap outcomes.

Job Requirements

- Master's degree in a relevant technical or quantitative discipline (e.g., Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, Statistics, Data Science, Computational Chemistry, Physics, Bioinformatics), or equivalent experience.
- A PhD and/or deep scientific domain expertise (chemistry, life sciences, materials science) is valued as a capability the person brings, and is not required.
- 8+ years of relevant experience, including 2-5+ years developing people and leading technical teams.
- Enough hands-on background in AI/ML engineering and data science to lead and coach the work credibly; direct roadmap or delivery ownership is not required at this level.
- Familiarity with up-to-date AI engineering — LLM-based, agentic, and large-scale retrieval and extraction systems.
- Experience building applications using AWS Serverless technologies such as Lambda, SQS, Fargate, DynamoDB, S3.
- Experience with Neo4j and graph analytics.
- Overseas experience in working arrangements — working with teams off continent (e.g., N. America, Europe, etc.).
- Proven ability to hire, coach, grow, and retain technical talent.
- Strong people-management, feedback, and career-development skills.
- Team-wide and enterprise-wide perspective, and readiness to lead initiatives beyond one's own reporting line.
- Ability to represent the team's work fluently and confidently to internal and external audiences.
- Sound judgment on team health, culture, and prioritization.
- Sufficient technical fluency to earn the trust of a team of data scientists and AI engineers.

📌 Lead - Data Scientist (Pune)
🏢 ACS International India (ACSII
📍 Pune