Designation - Software Engineer - Artificial Intelligence
Business Unit - Higher Education
Department - Technology
Experience Range - 4 years
Location - Bengaluru, Karnataka
About upGrad:
upGrad is one of India’s leading higher edtech platforms, serving millions of learners across 100+ countries with strong university and industry partnerships. With a mission to enable career success through outcome-driven learning, upGrad is now building its next growth engine focused on undergraduate learners across India.
About the Role:
We are looking for a Software Engineer – Artificial Intelligence who is passionate about building intelligent systems that solve real-world problems. You’ll work at the intersection of machine learning, large language models (LLMs), and backend engineering, turning research into production-ready systems.
This is a hands-on engineering role with a strong emphasis on scalable AI integration, prompt engineering, RAG (retrieval-augmented generation), and building intelligent APIs and microservices.
What You'll Do
- Design and build AI-powered applications using LLMs (OpenAI, LLaMA, Mistral, etc.), vector databases, and embedding models
- Build scalable backend systems and APIs (Python, FastAPI, Node.js, etc.) to serve AI features in production.
- Develop retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and manage unstructured knowledge bases (PDFs, docs, audio).
- Optimize inference pipelines for low latency and cost (e.g., with Ollama, vLLM, or LangChain).
- Work with tools like Whisper, HuggingFace, and Pinecone/ChromaDB/Weaviate
- Write clean, modular code and lead by example in engineering excellence.
- Collaborate closely with product, design, and ML teams to rapidly prototype and ship feaures.
Must-Have Skills:
- 4+ years of software engineering experience (Python preferred).
- Hands-on experience with LLMs, generative AI, or custom ML workflows.
- Strong understanding of NLP, embeddings, and vector search.
- Experience with FastAPI / Flask / Django and REST APIs.
- Solid grounding in Docker, Git, and CI/CD pipelines.
- Comfortable with cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure) and containerized deployments.
- Strong debugging, performance tuning, and system design skills.
Good to Have:
- Experience with LangChain, Haystack, or custom RAG frameworks.
- Familiarity with Whisper (speech-to-text) or audio/video transcription pipelines.
- Frontend knowledge in React.js is a bonus.
- Experience scaling AI systems to serve 10k+ users.
- MLOps exposure (MLFlow, Weights & Biases, etc.).