Engineering Lead (AI & Automation Products)

Job Description:

Location: Location: DGS – India (overlap hours with US Eastern Time required)

Required Qualifications

• •12–16 years of professional software engineering experience with deep Python expertise
• •Demonstrated experience leading or managing a team of engineers — code review, mentoring, growth planning — not just individual contribution
• •Strong experience designing and building production APIs in Python (FastAPI, Flask, or similar) and full-stack applications including React + Tailwind CSS front ends
• •Strong relational database experience — schema design, normalization, query performance — Postgres preferred
• •Strong practical proficiency with Claude Code or similar AI-assisted development tools, including agentic coding patterns and context management — and the ability to establish team standards for effective use
• •Experience integrating LLM APIs (Claude, OpenAI, or equivalent) into production systems — system prompt design, structured output parsing, multimodal input handling
• •Practical experience with tool-use/function-calling patterns — defining tool schemas, validating arguments, handling tool results, chaining tool calls, and managing basic failure/retry behavior
• •Strong context engineering fundamentals — context window management, token budgeting, long-document handling strategies, and retrieval/context-selection patterns
• •Awareness of prompt injection, adversarial inputs, and untrusted-document risks in AI systems; ability to design guardrails for external briefs, trafficking sheets, platform exports, and other model-readable inputs
• •Experience integrating third-party platform APIs with OAuth (any domain) — general competency, not platform-specific
• •Working knowledge of secrets management and credential security practices in production systems, ideally including Azure Key Vault or equivalent managed secrets tooling
• •Solid grasp of QA practices, data quality engineering, and AI evaluation: unit and integration testing, data validation, golden datasets, regression evals, structured-output checks, and observability
• •Practical understanding of human-in-the-loop AI systems — adjudication workflows, labeled examples, accuracy measurement by parameter/category, feedback loops, and quality gates
• •Experience with cloud infrastructure (Azure preferred) and modern deployment patterns: containers, CI/CD, managed identities, object storage, and background job/workflow execution
• •Experience implementing background-processing or workflow patterns — queues, scheduled jobs, retries, idempotency, status tracking, and operational monitoring
• •Strong written and verbal communication for collaboration across distributed onshore (US) and offshore (India) teams

Preferred Qualifications

• •Exposure to LLM application and workflow frameworks beyond raw API calls: LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, Temporal, Azure Durable Functions, Celery/RQ, or equivalent agent/workflow tooling — useful as the portfolio expands into durable, multi-step automation in later phases
• •Exposure to model selection and cost optimization strategies — prompt caching, batching, tiered model selection by task complexity, latency/cost tradeoff analysis, and usage forecasting
• •Background in media, advertising, or marketing technology data environments
• •Exposure to data governance tooling such as Unity Catalog, attribute-based access control, or tag-driven policies
• •Exposure to MCP servers or MCP-based developer workflows, with interest in when MCP is preferable to direct APIs for reusable tools, resources, prompts, and agent context
• •Exposure to data flywheel concepts — labeled corpora, adjudication data models, feedback capture, quality dashboards, and mechanisms that improve future AI behavior and inform phase-gate decisions
• •Exposure to DV360 SDF (Structured Data Files), TTD API, or comparable adtech platform data formats/APIs
• •Open-source contributions or public projects demonstrating full-stack or AI engineering work

Location:

DGS India - Bengaluru - Manyata N1 Block

Brand:

Merkle

Time Type:

Full time

Contract Type:

Permanent