Sber is looking for a Head of Data Science & AI (Indian Direction).
The team is the development center for Sber's Indian direction. India has about 1.46 billion people and over 85 million businesses. Russian-Indian trade turnover in 2025 is projected to be $63 billion, with up to 70% of payments going through Sber. The Indian direction is undergoing rapid growth, so the team is forming an AI-native direction to implement and develop internal AI tools, as well as new B2B/B2C solutions to achieve business goals in India.
They are looking for a leader who will grow an effective local team, define the direction's strategy, and build a complete cycle of AI product creation: from business hypothesis to production and measurable results.
Tasks:
- Form and develop a local Data Science & AI team in Bangalore: participate in hiring, set goals, develop employees, and manage results.
- Define the AI strategy, roadmap, budget, and priority portfolio of initiatives.
- Evaluate AI use cases considering business impact, data availability, risks, and time-to-value.
- Translate business tasks into verifiable AI/ML hypotheses with clear success criteria.
- Select appropriate architecture: classical ML, forecasting, recommendation systems, LLM applications, enterprise RAG, multimodal models, or AI agents.
- Lead the full development cycle: data evaluation, prototyping, development, evals, implementation, monitoring, and improvement of solutions.
- Develop managed agent scenarios with tool calling, retrieval, and human-in-the-loop.
- Collaborate with engineering teams to develop MLOps/LLMOps, observability, quality standards, and AI security.
- Manage the quality, latency, operational cost, and reliability of AI systems.
- Present results and defend technological solutions to stakeholders in Russia and India.
Requirements:
- 7+ years of experience in Data Science, ML, or Applied AI.
- 5+ years of experience managing technical teams in the AI field.
- Experience launching scalable AI/ML products.
- Experience in forming strategy, roadmap, and budget.
- Deep expertise in at least two areas: ML and recommendations, CV, NLP/LLM and RAG, AI agents, multimodal AI, or product analytics.
- Understanding of MLOps/LLMOps, evals, observability, and the full model lifecycle.
- Ability to connect technologies with business metrics and product economics.
- Fluent English at C1 level for daily work with an international team.
Will be an advantage:
- Experience managing an international or distributed team.
- Experience working with the Indian market.
- Experience creating multilingual or multimodal AI solutions.
- Practice working with incomplete and disparate data.
- Experience working in a bank, fintech, or other regulated industry.
Conditions and benefits:
- Voluntary medical insurance, insurance against accidents and serious illnesses.
- Corporate pension program and social support.
- Training at SberUniversity and participation in industry conferences.
- Preferential terms on Sber products, including a mortgage program.
