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Senior Applied AI/ML Engineer

About the Role

DPDzero is looking for an experienced and motivated Senior Applied AI/ML Engineer to help design, build, and scale our conversational AI systems that power next-generation digital debt collections. This role is ideal for someone who thrives in fast-paced environments, is passionate about machine learning, and enjoys building intelligent systems that create real business value.

You’ll work closely with product, engineering, and data teams to build and integrate language models, NLP components, and dialogue systems into user-facing experiences. You’ll take full ownership of model performance, accuracy, and maintainability, while playing a key role in shaping how AI enhances customer interactions across our platform.

Responsibilities

  • Work with cross-functional teams to turn fuzzy product ideas into AI-powered conversational features
  • Design, train, fine-tune, and deploy NLP and LLM-based models for tasks such as intent detection, summarization, classification, and dialogue management
  • Build scalable, maintainable ML pipelines and model APIs that integrate seamlessly with production systems
  • Collaborate with software engineers to integrate AI/ML solutions into production systems
  • Own AI components end-to-end — from rapid prototyping and offline experimentation to deployment and live performance tracking
  • Develop evaluation frameworks and testing strategies (e.g., offline metrics, A/B tests, human-in-the-loop review) to ensure conversational quality and robustness
  • Mentor junior Applied AI/ML engineers through code reviews, design guidance, and feedback
  • Help set best practices for model development, experiment tracking, CI/CD for ML, and system observability

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of experience building and deploying production-grade machine learning or NLP systems
  • Strong programming skills in Python, with hands-on experience in frameworks like PyTorch and Transformers; exposure to orchestration tools (e.g., LangChain) and LLM APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic)
  • Solid experience working with transformer-based models like BERT, T5, or GPT, including fine-tuning using methods such as LoRA, QLoRA, or full-parameter training
  • Solid understanding of modern NLP techniques (e.g., text classification, embeddings, summarization, dialogue systems)
  • Familiarity with engineering practices such as testing, monitoring, CI/CD, and scalable architecture in ML contexts
  • Proven track record of owning models or features end-to-end — from experimentation to deployment and iteration
  • Experience mentoring peers and contributing to team-wide engineering and modeling standards

Nice to have

  • Experience fine-tuning or integrating large language models into real-world product workflows
  • Knowledge of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), prompt engineering, and conversational UX design
  • Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and ML infrastructure tools (e.g., MLflow, Weights & Biases)
  • Experience working in a startup or fast-paced, product-focused environment

About DPDzero

DPDzero builds the AI-first collections platform that lets lenders grow confidently while we take care of delinquency. We combine smart automation, a multilingual conversational voice agent, and disciplined field & telecalling execution to turn a difficult part of the lending lifecycle into measurable business impact. Our platform ties decisioning, outreach orchestration, and human-in-the-loop workflows into auditable, compliance-ready pipelines so partners can integrate us like core infrastructure.

We’re product-led and ops-backed: what you build here ships, scales, and changes real KPIs. That work isn’t just for engineers — account managers, operations specialists, compliance leads, and HR professionals all play a hands-on role in making experiments actionable and outcomes repeatable. At DPDzero you’ll collaborate across product, ML, and field teams to measure and improve things that matter (recovery rate, contact yield, compliance signals), not just ship features.

We’re backed by experienced investors and led by operators who have built India-scale fintech rails, so expect a high-ownership environment where impact is measured and rewarded. If you want a role where your day-to-day work directly moves company and partner outcomes — whether in product, sales, ops, or people — come help us expand credit access responsibly and at scale.