Engineering Manager, Data Scientist

ABOUT

The Persona Labs is building a new kind of social platform focused on something most social products do not explicitly optimize for: helping people become real friends.

We want to help people discover interesting people around them, find meaningful common ground, start low-pressure interactions, continue promising conversations, create shared experiences, and ultimately build real-life friendships.

DISCOVER → CURIOSITY → COMPATIBILITY → INTERACTION → UNDERSTAND → IRL EXPERIENCE → FRIENDSHIP

THE AI LAYER - COMPANION INTELLIGENCE

Alongside the platform, we are building a proactive personal AI companion that learns about the user and helps them navigate this journey through personalized recommendations, suggestions, reminders, conversations, and experiences. 

THE OPPORTUNITY

We are looking for a Founding ML Engineer to build the intelligence layer of the platform from the ground up. This is a 0→1 Applied AI / ML role where you will work directly with the founder and Product Engineer to turn ambiguous problems around users, relationships, recommendations and personal intelligence into working systems.

You will be expected to:

Understand the problem → identify the signals → design the intelligence system → prototype → evaluate → deploy → learn → improve.

WHAT YOU WILL BUILD & OWN

USER INTELLIGENCE

User representations, behavioural models, interests, preferences, contextual signals, and evolving understanding of the user. MEMORY Short- and long-term memory, episodic/preference/relationship memory, retrieval, relevance and updating.

RECOMMENDATION & MATCHING

People discovery, compatibility, activity/experience recommendations, and personalized ranking.

INTENT & INTEREST

Infer what the user is trying to do and learn what they care about from behaviour, not only declared interests.

RANKING

Decide what should appear first across potentially thousands of relevant people, activities or experiences.

CONTENT INTELLIGENCE

Classification, toxicity, spam, policy signals, quality, relevance, and semantic understanding.

RELATIONSHIP INTELLIGENCE

Reciprocity, interaction health, shared interests, progression, declining engagement and shared activity.

NEXT-BEST-ACTION

Determine the most useful action now: show a person, suggest a question, recommend an activity, reconnect, or do nothing.

TRUST / SAFETY INTELLIGENCE

Fake-account signals, spam, abuse, behavioural anomalies, risky interactions and moderation assistance.

COMPANION INTELLIGENCE

Use signals and outputs to help the companion decide what to say, suggest, recommend or not do. 

WHAT YOUR DAY-TO-DAY LOOKS LIKE

• Translate ambiguous product problems into ML/AI system designs.

• Build models and intelligence pipelines using behavioural, relational and contextual signals.

• Develop recommendation, matching and personalization systems.

• Design memory and retrieval systems that help the companion understand the user over time.

• Build and evaluate LLM-powered and agentic workflows.

• Decide when to use traditional ML, rules, retrieval, ranking or LLMs.

• Prototype quickly, test assumptions and iterate based on real user behaviour.

• Work closely with the founder and Product Engineer to turn intelligence into product experiences.

• Design APIs and production systems that bring ML/AI capabilities into the application.

• Build evaluation, monitoring and feedback loops so the intelligence improves over time.

WHO SHOULD APPLY

• Experience: 0–4 years’ experience, including exceptional fresh graduates. Strong 1–3 year engineers and experienced 3–4 year product builders are welcome.

• Strong foundations in ML, Python, statistics and software engineering.

• Evidence of Building: Experience with AI/ML projects, recommendation systems, LLM applications or personalization is highly valued.

• Strong evidence of building: Shipped projects, research, hackathons, internships, open source or startup work. 

WHAT WE LOOK FOR

MACHINE LEARNING DEPTH

Can you understand the modelling problem underneath the application?

RECOMMENDATION & PERSONALIZATION

Can you reason about relevance, ranking, cold start and behavioural signals?

AI ENGINEERING

Can you turn LLMs and agents into reliable product capabilities rather than simple API wrappers?

USER INTELLIGENCE

Can you design systems that gradually understand a person from sparse and changing signals?

SYSTEMS THINKING

Can you move from a model to a production system with APIs, data, latency, cost and monitoring?

EVALUATION MINDSET

Can you determine whether the intelligence actually helped the user?

PRODUCT JUDGMENT

Can you decide what the system should do when there is no predefined answer?

SPEED OF EXECUTION

Can you move from idea → prototype → evaluation → production quickly and responsibly?

BUILD WITH US

You will join at a stage where many of the answers do not exist yet. You will not simply implement a model someone else selected; you will help decide how the product learns to understand people.

CAREERS:

Apply with your resume, GitHub, portfolio or shipped work.

https://forms.gle/12YpUSBY2Sqs5xjp8

www.thepersonalabs.com

Job Description:

We are seeking a versatile and highly skilled Lead AI/ML Engineer with deep expertise in Generative AI (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs). This role requires a leader who can take full ownership of the

AI lifecycle—from initial architectural design to final production execution. You will lead the development of scalable AI-powered applications, demonstrating exceptional execution skills and the ability to deliver high-performance results under pressure in demanding production environments.

Machine Learning & LLM Capability:

 End-to-End ML Engineering: Build and manage comprehensive ML pipelines, including data ingestion, preprocessing, training, and evaluation using frameworks like PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Scikit-learn.  Advanced LLM Systems: Design and implement sophisticated LLM-based applications such as autonomous agents, chatbots, and complex automation tools.

 Generative AI Specialization: Architect and optimize Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines using vector databases like FAISS, Pinecone, or Weaviate.

 Model Optimization: Fine-tune open-source and proprietary models (e.g., LLaMA, GPT) using advanced techniques like LoRA, QLoRA, or instruction tuning.

 Agentic Frameworks: Develop complex agentic workflows utilizing frameworks such as LangChain or LlamaIndex.

 Prompt Engineering: Implement expert-level prompt engineering, tool/function calling, and structured output generation.

 Project Ownership & Execution

 Full Lifecycle Ownership: Take complete accountability for the full ML and GenAI lifecycle, spanning data processing, model development, monitoring, and optimization.

 Architectural Leadership: Drive strategic architectural decisions for AI platforms, ensuring they are modular, scalable, and maintainable.

 Execution Excellence: Write clean, high-performance Python code following strict OOP principles and manage CI/CD pipelines for seamless project execution.

 Leadership & Mentoring: Act as a key technical leader, managing stakeholders and mentoring team members to ensure all project milestones are met with quality.

 System Integrity: Manage model and prompt versioning, experiment tracking, and comprehensive documentation for all pipelines and workflows.

 Performance Under Pressure

 Production Reliability: Ensure all AI systems maintain extreme scalability and performance under heavy production workloads, including both batch and real-time processing.

 High-Pressure Optimization: Rapidly optimize inference latency and system costs for ML and LLM systems to meet urgent business and technical requirements.

 Proactive Problem Solving: Apply strong analytical thinking to address complex challenges such as system drift, hallucinations, and latency in fast-paced environments.

 Robust Guardrails: Implement and manage strict evaluation frameworks and feedback loops to maintain system quality under stress.

Qualifications:

 Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, AI, ML, or a related field.

 Proven expertise in Python, system design, and scalable AI/ML architecture.

 Deep knowledge of NLP, Computer Vision, and Deep Learning models.

 Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, MLOps, and major cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).

🔹 Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and deploy production-grade AI/ML and Generative AI solutions

• Work on GEO, AEO, and SGE initiatives to improve visibility across AI-driven search platforms

• Optimize content and digital experiences for conversational queries and LLM-based search

• Develop solutions using LLMs, NLP, embeddings, semantic search, RAG, and vector databases

• Analyze search intent, AI-generated responses, citations, retrieval patterns, and content discoverability

• Build frameworks to measure GEO/AEO strategies and AI-search performance

• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, Content, SEO, Marketing, and Business teams

• Improve solution accuracy, relevance, latency, and user experience

🔹 Mandatory Requirements

✅ 1–4 years of professional experience

✅ Minimum 1 year of hands-on experience in GEO, AEO, or SGE

✅ Experience with prompt engineering, embeddings, vector search, or RAG systems

✅ Understanding of semantic search and entity-based optimization

✅ Exposure to ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or similar LLM platforms

✅ Knowledge of schema, context building, content structuring, and knowledge representation

🎓 Preferred Education

B.Tech, M.Tech, Integrated M.Sc., or MS from a Tier-1 engineering institute such as IIT, NIT, BITS, VIT, DTU, or NSUT.