Staff AI Engineer at BP in Pune, India

BP is seeking experienced engineers to join its AI Acceleration organization in Pune, India. This team focuses on building high-impact, AI-powered applications that deliver significant business value rapidly. As a Staff AI Engineer, you will be instrumental in designing, developing, and deploying scalable AI solutions.

This role is for seasoned engineers who are passionate about applying AI and machine learning in practical, large-scale applications. You will work at the intersection of disciplined software development and modern AI, guiding the full product lifecycle from ideation to operations. Strong systems thinking, an ownership mindset, and the ability to deliver value quickly are essential. Collaboration with engineers, data scientists, product managers, and business stakeholders will be key to defining problems, shaping solutions, and ensuring AI models perform reliably.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, and maintain production-grade AI applications and services, adhering to modern software engineering practices like CI/CD, testing, observability, and cloud-native design.
• Define and implement foundational AI platforms, such as conversational bots, AI-powered search, and unstructured data processing, ensuring reusability and scalability across the enterprise.
• Lead architectural decisions, establishing guidelines for software development, explainability, and responsible AI.
• Spearhead cross-functional team initiatives and embedded projects with business stakeholders to rapidly build and deploy AI solutions for high-priority problems.
• Evaluate and integrate existing AI tools, frameworks, and APIs, including LLMs, vector databases, and retrieval-augmented generation, into robust applications.
• Champion automation across workflows, from data ingestion and preprocessing to model integration and deployment, defining success criteria, metrics, and standard operating procedures.
• Partner with data scientists, product managers, and other engineers to ensure the end-to-end delivery and reliability of AI products.
• Stay abreast of emerging AI technologies, prioritizing practical application and delivery over experimental research.
• Contribute to internal knowledge bases, tooling libraries, and documentation to scale engineering practices throughout the organization.
• Mentor other engineers and data scientists, providing technical leadership to enhance rigor and impact across projects.

Required Qualifications:

• A minimum of 12 years of professional software engineering experience, with a proven ability to independently design and deploy complex systems in production.
• Strong programming proficiency in Python (preferred), Java, or similar languages, with experience in developing microservices, APIs, and backend systems.
• A solid understanding of software architecture, cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP), and modern DevOps practices.
• Demonstrated experience integrating machine learning models into production systems, including LLMs via APIs, fine-tuning, RAG patterns, embeddings, and agent frameworks.
• Hands-on experience with large language models (LLMs), vector-based search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or unstructured data processing.
• The ability to maintain high code quality, test coverage, and operational excellence while working at a fast pace.
• Excellent problem-solving skills, a proactive approach, and the capacity to navigate ambiguity and lead through complexity.
• Extensive experience in technical mentorship and influencing cross-team initiatives.
• The ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear business insights for cross-functional partners.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Familiarity with AI/ML tools such as LangChain, Haystack, Hugging Face, Weaviate, or similar ecosystems.
• Experience utilizing GenAI frameworks like LlamaIndex, Crew AI, AutoGen, or other agentic/LLM orchestration toolkits.
• Experience in building reusable modeling components or contributing to internal ML platforms.
• Background in working with embedded teams or in forward-deployed environments requiring rapid iteration and close business teamwork.
• Proficiency in Python and common ML/data science libraries (e.g., scikit-learn, pandas, NumPy, PyTorch, TensorFlow).
• A strong grasp of machine learning fundamentals, including supervised and unsupervised learning, model evaluation, and statistical inference.
• Exposure to processing unstructured data (documents, conversations, images) and transforming it into usable structured formats.
• Experience building chatbots, search systems, or generative AI interfaces.
• Experience in platform engineering or internal developer tools teams.

This role is eligible for relocation within India and is a hybrid of office and remote working. Up to 10% travel may be expected.