Working at Wadhwani AI

Wadhwani AI occupies a unique position in the world of applied technology: we are an independent and nonprofit organisation working for the benefit of underserved communities.

We drive impact at scale through world-class AI research, innovation, and deployment. We believe in diversity—across skill sets, backgrounds, and perspectives—and in leveraging it to effect change that is truly meaningful, positive, and sustainable. This belief is reflected in the composition of our team and in the way we work.

Our Hiring Philosophy

We are eager to bring on individuals who have the intent, creativity and ability to solve big challenges, and drive initiatives to improve the lives of the underserved. Whether defining problems that can be solved by AI, working through complex user-related matters, designing and developing algorithms, deploying solutions with our partners, or delivering value to our customers, we would like to bring on people who take the initiative to get things done, without excuses. This requires a firm intent backed by perseverance. And it will be immediately apparent to you that the teams you will work with possess the same intent.

We offer an environment of limitless learning, and encourage you to implement your learning, carefully and intelligently. We believe that this dual aspect of learning and its application to solve real-world problems is the cornerstone to building expertise in our institute. We encourage you to learn from others, embrace humility, and be uncompromising about the quality of the work that you do.

Our core belief is: Opportunities are limitless. We are only constrained by our own intent, perseverance and capabilities.

Our Mission

To leverage AI technology to serve the underserved in developing countries, and work towards ensuring that our innovations will improve the lives of those who need them the most.

Who we are looking for

We want people who are ethical, competent, humble, persistent, and committed to the mission of the institute.

We invite individuals who are willing to challenge the status quo and open to learn, unlearn, and relearn. Cross-disciplinary expertise is critical to our work. If you enjoy working with a diverse and motivated team, thrive while solving challenges collaboratively, learn all the time, and want to work towards paving a path for the adoption of AI-based solutions, you’re likely to fit in well at Wadhwani AI.

We are an applied AI institute aligned to meet the goals of our mission. Ethics, competence, simplicity, discipline, persistence, and humility will serve you well.

Our values

Serve

Serve our cause. Our mission is often challenging but also opens up exciting opportunities to create innovative solutions and modernize existing delivery mechanisms, making them more efficient and effective. Build, hone, and use your capability to serve the underprivileged with an empathetic outlook. Grow through competent service.

Learn

Be curious. Learn by observing in an unbiased manner, immersing yourself in your core material, disseminating knowledge passionately and altruistically, and creating holistic patterns from jigsaw pieces. Aspire to attain clarity in the wake of ambiguity. When you do not know, ask. Grow by learning.

Care

Express care through attitude and action to the people you interact with: your co-workers, our customers and donors, our end-users, and our partners. Be kind and courteous in all your interactions. For us, teamwork implies personal competence and empathy through care for others. Grow by caring.

Communicate

Think clearly, write, and speak in a simple and concise manner, without errors. Our expression must be excellent, in absolute terms. That is our statement to the world. Grow by communicating.

Our Work Culture

Be a self-starter. Create work products of the highest quality, that we are proud to share with the world.

Our work includes problem definition, research publication, AI innovation, software design, user research, and measurement approach. Translate everything into a tangible outcome that accretes to our goals.

Reflect an ethical approach, simplicity, competence, persistence and humility in all that you do. Be creative and disciplined—know what approach applies at what times.

Make your education and experience count.

If you think you’d like to contribute to our mission, we’d love to bring you on board.

ML Engineer

ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

An ML Engineer at Wadhwani AI will be responsible for building robust machine learning solutions to problems of societal importance; usually under the guidance of senior ML scientists, and in collaboration with dedicated software engineers. To our partners, a Wadhwani AI solution is generally a decision making tool that requires some piece of data to engage. It will be your responsibility to ensure that the information provided using that piece of data is sound. This not only requires robust learned models, but pipelines over which those models can be built, tweaked, tested, and monitored. The following subsections provide details from the perspective of solution design:

Early stage of proof of concept (PoC)

  • Setup and structure code bases that support an interactive ML experimentation process, as well as quick initial deployments
  • Develop and maintain toolsets and processes for ensuring the reproducibility of results
  • Code reviews with other technical team members at various stages of the PoC
  • Develop, extend, adopt a reliable, colab-like environment for ML

Late PoC

This is early to mid-stage of AI product development

  • Develop ETL pipelines. These can also be shared and/or owned by data engineers
  • Setup and maintain feature stores, databases, and data catalogs. Ensuring data veracity and lineage of on-demand pulls
  • Develop and support model health metrics

Post PoC

Responsibilities during production deployment

  • Develop and support A/B testing. Setup continuous integration and development (CI/CD) processes and pipelines for models
  • Develop and support continuous model monitoring
  • Define and publish service-level agreements (SLAs) for model serving. Such agreements include model latency, throughput, and reliability
  • L1/L2/L3 support for model debugging
  • Develop and support model serving environments
  • Model compression and distillation

We realize this list is broad and extensive. While the ideal candidate has some exposure to each of these topics, we also envision great candidates being experts at some subset. If either of those cases happens to be you, please apply.

DESIRED QUALIFICATIONS

Master’s degree or above in a STEM field. Several years of experience getting their hands dirty applying their craft.

Programming

  • Expert level Python programmer
  • Hands-on experience with Python libraries
    • Popular neural network libraries
    • Popular data science libraries (Pandas, numpy)
  • Knowledge of systems-level programming. Under the hood knowledge of C or C++
  • Experience and knowledge of various tools that fit into the model building pipeline. There are several – you should be able to speak to the pluses and minuses of a variety of tools given some challenge within the ML development pipeline
  • Database concepts; SQL
  • Experience with cloud platforms is a plus
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ML Scientist

ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

As an ML Scientist at Wadhwani AI, you will be responsible for building robust machine learning solutions to problems of societal importance, usually under the guidance of senior ML scientists. You will participate in translating a problem in the social sector to a well-defined AI problem, in the development and execution of algorithms and solutions to the problem, in the successful and scaled deployment of the AI solution, and in defining appropriate metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of the deployed solution.

In order to apply machine learning for social good, you will need to understand user challenges and their context, curate and transform data, train and validate models, run simulations, and broadly derive insights from data. In doing so, you will work in cross-functional teams spanning ML modeling, engineering, product, and domain experts. You will also interface with social sector organizations as appropriate.  

REQUIREMENTS

Associate ML scientists will have a strong academic background in a quantitative field (see below) at the Bachelor’s or Master’s level, with project experience in applied machine learning. They will possess demonstrable skills in coding, data mining and analysis, and building and implementing ML or statistical models. Where needed, they will have to learn and adapt to the requirements imposed by real-life, scaled deployments. 

Candidates should have excellent communication skills and a willingness to adapt to the challenges of doing applied work for social good. 

DESIRED QUALIFICATIONS

  • B.Tech./B.E./B.S./M.Tech./M.E./M.S./M.Sc. or equivalent in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Physics, Economics, or a relevant quantitative field. Work experience beyond the terminal degree will determine the appropriate seniority level.
  • Solid software engineering skills across one or multiple languages including Python, C++, Java.
  • Interest in applying software engineering practices to ML projects.
  • Track record of project work in applied machine learning. Experience in applying AI models to concrete real-world problems is a plus.
  • Strong verbal and written communication skills in English.
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