Principal, Applied Science at Tekion

This role is designed for a heavyweight AI leader with over 10 years of experience who can bridge the gap between deep research and production engineering. You should be a "Principal" in every sense—capable of architecting complex agentic systems, defining evaluation frameworks from scratch, and setting the technical direction for how AI services interact with core enterprise platforms. This is a high-visibility, on-site leadership position in Chennai with a global impact. You’ll be the highest-level AI authority on the team, influencing the roadmap of a "unicorn" automotive cloud platform. The package includes professional growth alongside Silicon Valley veterans, competitive stock options, and the chance to move beyond basic LLM wrappers to build sophisticated, multi-agent architectures. **You might be a good fit if you...** * Have 10+ years of ML experience, specifically building and shipping production RAG and agentic workflows (LangGraph, CrewAI). * Are a Python master (PyTorch, Hugging Face) who also understands system architecture like hexagonal adapter contracts. * Excel at defining "golden datasets" and CI/CD eval pipelines to measure AI success beyond simple accuracy. * Can translate complex AI research (RLHF, DPO, Sparse Retrieval) into practical tools for a massive SaaS ecosystem.