AI Engineer- Team Lead

What We're Looking For

We are looking for an experienced AI Engineer to join our AI engineering team in Hyderabad. The team is new and built around strong early-career engineers - what it needs now is senior craft alongside them.

Our goal is to automate expert work for two audiences. Internally, we build AI systems that let teams across the company produce more and better work in less time. Externally, we build custom AI solutions for enterprise customers - bespoke enrichment pipelines, data feeds, and automated workflows shaped around a specific customer's problem. The internal tools we build usually become the foundation of what we sell.

AI engineers and software engineers build and jointly own our solutions. You will work alongside them from problem framing and prototyping through production and iteration, and help set the engineering bar for a team that is still forming it.

What You'll Do

Build and ship AI systems

• Design, build, and operate LLM-powered agents and multi-step workflows - tool use, planning, state and memory, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and sensible recovery when a step fails.
• Build forward-engineering agents: systems that take an ambiguous customer or business input and produce working technical output - queries, configurations, enrichment logic, briefs - that internal teams and customers then rely on.
• Take solutions into production and keep them healthy - deploy, monitor, and optimize for reliability and cost together.

Get the quality right

• Do prompt engineering properly: task decomposition, context design, structured outputs, tools and schemas, and the right model for each step. We treat prompts as engineering artifacts - versioned and reviewed like code.
• Build evaluation into the work - golden datasets, regression suites, and the metrics that matter for each workflow: accuracy, groundedness, hallucination rate, latency, and cost per unit of work.
• Know when an LLM is not the answer, and when retrieval, a classical model, or plain deterministic code is better.

Lift the team

• Mentor early-career engineers through code review, pairing, and design discussion. Most of the team is within a year of graduating and learns fast when it is taught well.
• Help set the standards the team works to - testing, prompt and evaluation conventions, observability, and what “done” means for an AI feature.
• Work with product managers, platform engineers, and the teams who use what we build, across several time zones - translating fuzzy requirements into a technical approach with the trade-offs stated plainly.

What You'll Bring

• 4-9 years in software engineering, AI/ML engineering, or a related technical role, including hands-on experience taking AI-powered applications into production.
• A system you have built and operated where an LLM did real work - and a clear sense of how you knew it was working, what broke, and what you changed.
• Strong Python and solid software engineering fundamentals, with a good understanding of API design and integration patterns.
• Practical experience with agent and orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, MCP-based tooling, or equivalent) and with frontier model APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, or comparable).
• Working knowledge of RAG, vector and keyword search (OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, or equivalent) for grounding models in proprietary data.
• A solid grounding in traditional ML alongside the generative side - classification, clustering, embeddings, feature engineering, and standard evaluation methodology - and the judgment to pick a classical model when it is faster, cheaper, and more predictable than a prompt.
• Experience with at least one major cloud (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud), containers, and CI/CD.
• Some experience mentoring or technically guiding less-experienced engineers.
• Clear communication and comfort with ambiguity - a working prototype that proves the idea, then the engineering to make it durable.
• Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science or an equivalent degree.

Nice to Have

• Large-scale LLM enrichment or classification pipelines, where cost and quality per document both matter.
• A background in NLP, information retrieval, or media and text analytics.
• Transformers, fine-tuning, PyTorch or TensorFlow; or computer vision and speech-to-text in production.

Why This Role

The team is new, the problem space is genuinely unsolved, and the work goes straight into the hands of people who depend on it daily. You will shape how a team builds AI systems rather than maintain someone else's decisions.

You do not need every item on this list. If you are strong across most of it and curious about the rest, we would like to hear from you.

What We Offer:

• Enjoy flexible paid time off options for enhanced work-life balance.
• Comprehensive health insurance tailored for you.
• Employee assistance programs cover mental health, legal, financial, wellness, and behaviour areas to ensure your overall well-being.
• Complimentary Calm App subscription for you and your loved ones, because mental wellness matters.
• Energetic work environment with a hybrid work style, providing the balance you need.
• Benefit from our family leave program, which grows with your tenure at Meltwater.
• Thrive within our inclusive community and seize ongoing professional development opportunities to elevate your career

Where You'll Work: Hyderabad

When You'll Join: As per the Offer Letter.

Our Story

At Meltwater, we believe that when you have the right people in the right environment, great things happen.

Our best-in-class technology empowers our 27,000 customers around the world to make better business decisions through data. But we can’t do that without our global team of developers, innovators, problem-solvers, and high-performers who embrace challenges and find new solutions for our customers.

Our award-winning global culture drives everything we do and creates an environment where our employees can make an impact, learn every day, feel a sense of belonging, and celebrate each other’s successes along the way. We are innovators at the core who see the potential in people, ideas and technologies. Together, we challenge ourselves to go big, be bold, and build best-in-class solutions for our customers. We’re proud of our diverse team of 2,200+ employees in 50 locations across 25 countries around the world. No matter where you are, you’ll work with people who care about your success and get the support you need to unlock new heights in your career.

We are Meltwater. We love working here, and we think you will too.

"Inspired by innovation, powered by people."

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

Meltwater is an Equal Opportunity Employer and Prohibits Discrimination and Harassment of Any Kind: At Meltwater, we are dedicated to fostering an inclusive and diverse workplace where every employee feels valued, respected, and empowered. We are committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity and strive to provide a work environment that is free from discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions at Meltwater are made based on business needs, job requirements,and individual qualifications, without regard to race, colour, religion or belief, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, marital status, veteran status, or any other status protected by the applicable laws and regulations.Meltwater does not tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind, and we actively promote a culture of respect, fairness, and inclusivity. We encourage applicants of all backgrounds, experiences, and abilities to apply and join us in our mission to drive innovation and make a positive impact in the world