Deputy Unit Manager - Finserv Intelligence

Job Summary

As a Research Scientist in the BFS Intelligence Division, you will lead the charge in developing Sovereign AI models designed specifically for the linguistic, cultural, and structural complexities of the Indian subcontinent. You are not merely fine-tuning open-source models; you are architecting the Small Language Models (SLMs) and Multimodal Engines (Vision, Voice, Agentic AI) that will power the next decade of Indian finance, retail, and digital public infrastructure. You will operate in a 'Dual-Helix' environment: 50% deep-tech discovery in IIT Research Labs and 50% high-stakes industrialization within our Corporate Innovation Hub, bridging academic theory with enterprise-scale deployment at a pace that sets India's AI agenda globally.

Responsibilities

Frontier RD: The SLM Multimodal Roadmap: Sovereign SLMs: Architect and pre-train domain-specific Small Language Models (1B7B parameters) that outperform GPT-4 in niche BFSI tasks while running on cost-effective, edge-based hardware.

Multimodal Fusion: Develop 'Vision-Voice-Text' integrated models for hyper-personalized customer experience e.g., AI agents that can 'see' a customer's physical document via camera and 'talk' through a complex loan process in regional dialects.

Geospatial Alternative Intelligence: Build models that fuse satellite imagery and geospatial data with financial transaction patterns to predict credit risk in rural and semi-urban markets.

Data Engineering Ethics: Synthetic Data Synthesis: Create high-fidelity, privacy-preserving synthetic datasets to train models where real-world BFS data is restricted or sparse.

Agentic Frameworks: Research 'Chain-of-Thought' and 'Reasoning-Action' (ReAct) patterns to transform chatbots into Autonomous Financial Agents capable of executing cross-platform transactions.

IIT Ecosystem Leadership: Academic Bridge: Lead collaborative 'Moonshot' projects with IIT faculty, ensuring that theoretical breakthroughs in neural architecture search or attention mechanisms are patented and productized.

Knowledge Sovereignty: Represent the firm at global forums (NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR) to showcase 'India-First' AI innovations, moving the needle from consumption to creation.

Mentor B.Tech/M.Tech interns from IIT partner institutions, building a pipeline of Sovereign AI talent.

Serve as Technical Advisor to portfolio startups within the $50M Deep-Tech Portfolio.

Drive IP strategy identify patentable innovations across SLM architecture, multimodal fusion, and agentic frameworks.

Collaborate with Consumer, Retail, Digital Platforms, Customer Experience, and Enterprise Process teams to convert research into production AI solutions.

Major Challenges

Pre-training and fine-tuning 1B7B SLMs for BFSI-specific tasks with limited labeled Indian-language data.

Achieving real-time multimodal inference (Vision-Voice-Text) at the latency standards required for live customer interactions and Video-KYC workflows.

Building privacy-preserving synthetic datasets that faithfully replicate the statistical properties of restricted real-world BFS data.

Translating ReAct/agentic reasoning research into production-safe Autonomous Financial Agents that comply with RBI and SEBI regulatory frameworks.

Maintaining academic publication velocity while simultaneously industrializing models inside a high-stakes corporate environment.

Balancing 50% IIT lab discovery time against 50% Corporate Innovation Hub delivery commitments across a multi-campus rotation model.

Educational Qualifications

PhD or Post-Doctoral qualification from a top-tier global or Indian institution (IIT, IISc, CMU, Stanford), specializing in Deep Learning, NLP, or Computer Vision preferred.

MTech from an equivalent Tier-1 institution also considered.

Work Experience Core Competencies

The 'Build' Mindset: Expert-level proficiency in PyTorch and/or JAX; experience with high-performance computing (CUDA, Triton) and distributed training across GPU clusters.

Innovation Track Record: Portfolio of peer-reviewed publications OR a GitHub repository demonstrating implementation of frontier architectures (Transformers, State Space Models/Mamba, Diffusion Models).

Strategic Fungibility: Ability to pivot between Speech AI (ASR/TTS for 22+ Indian languages) and Transactional AI (fraud detection, risk modeling) as cluster priorities evolve.

India Stack Fluency: Deep understanding of India's digital public infrastructure (UPI, ONDC, Account Aggregator, ABDM) and its AI opportunity surface.

Agentic AI Experience: Familiarity with Chain-of-Thought, ReAct, and multi-agent orchestration frameworks for building Autonomous Financial Agents.

Communication Collaboration: Demonstrated ability to publish, present, and translate research into enterprise-grade PoCs. Experience mentoring IIT interns is an added advantage.