Scientist
Job Summary
Connected Assets
600000 across 40 industries globally
Digital Products Powered
13 (WQ IQ CIP IQ Aqua IQ Dish IQ Pest Intelligence Kitchen IQ HX IQ and more)
Digital Revenue Enabled
$370M annually
Data Points Processed
250 billion per year from industrial IoT controllers
Team Size
150 domain experts across 6 global locations
Global Locations
Pune (India) Naperville (USA) Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) and 3 additional sites
Alarm Automation Rate
88% and growing through AI-driven transformation
TVD Generated
$22M in 2025 on track for $100M in 2026
EGIC 2.0 Transformation Context
EGIC is undergoing a fundamental transformation from reactive operations (EGIC 1.0) to an autonomous intelligence engine (EGIC 2.0) through two strategic programs:
AIM (AI Integration & Modernization):Embedding AI across all EGIC workflows automating reactive alarm triage building predictive intelligence and liberating 2530 FTE-equivalent capacity through agentic automation.
APEX (Adoption Proactive Engagement & eXpansion):Driving digital adoption converting hardware-only customers to digital subscribers and scaling TVD from $22M to $100M through proactive customer engagement.
This role is central to both programs the candidate will lead the AI team that powers AIM and provides the intelligence backbone for APEX.
3. Role Summary
3.1 The Opportunity
We are looking for aSr AI Engineer a rare hybrid professional who combines deep business process understanding with advanced AI/Data Science technical expertise and proven people leadership. This individual will lead a team of 56 data scientists and AI engineers driving the daily AI operations projectdelivery model deployment adoption enablement and production triage across EGICs entire digital product portfolio.
The ideal candidate has walked a deliberate career path: starting with understanding how business processes work (BPA) then building the AI that transforms those processes (Data Science) and now leading the team that operates scales and governs that AI at enterprise grade (Leadership). This combination ensures the candidate doesnt just build technically impressive models but builds the RIGHT models that solve REAL operational problems and deliver MEASURABLE business outcomes.
3.2 What Makes This Role Unique
You will lead AI operations for one of the largest industrial IoT intelligence centers in the world 600K connected assets 250B data points/year
Your models will directly impact water conservation energy efficiency and sustainability outcomes for customers across 40 industries globally
You will have end-to-end ownership: from identifying the business problem (BPA lens) designing the AI solution (DS lens) deploying and scaling it (Ops lens) measuring its impact (Leadership lens)
You will build and shape a team from a position of influence defining the culture technical standards and the operational playbook
Direct visibility to EGIC Director and senior leadership your work directly drives strategic decisions and commercial outcomes ($100M TVD target)
Cutting-edge technology: Databricks Azure LLMs agentic AI RAG pipelines edge computing real-time IoT streaming
3.3 This Role Is NOT
NOT a pure research/academic role we need production engineers not just experimenters
NOT a people-only management role you must be technically hands-on and review architecture decisions
NOT a single-project role you will manage a portfolio of 35 concurrent AI projects across different digital products
NOT isolated from the business you will regularly interact with Operations Product Engineering Field and Customer-facing teams
4. Key Responsibilities
4A. Business Process Analysis & Operations Leadership
Your BPA foundation differentiates this role from a typical Data Science lead. You will use process analysis expertise to ensure every AI solution is grounded in a deep understanding of the operational workflow it serves. AI without process understanding leads to technically impressive but operationally useless solutions.
i. End-to-End Process Mapping & Analysis
Map all EGIC operational workflows across 13 digital products from data ingestion alarm generation triage insight creation customer delivery value capture (TVD)
Identify human touchpoints decision nodes escalation paths and handoff points in each workflow
Quantify time spent error rates and throughput at each process step to identify automation ROI
Use BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) or equivalent tools to create standardized version-controlled process documentation
ii. Automation Opportunity Identification
Systematically identify and prioritize automation candidates using a structured scoring framework (Impact Feasibility Urgency)
Distinguish between rule-based automation (RPA) ML-based automation (predictive models) and agentic automation (LLM-powered agents) recommending the right approach for each use case
Build and maintain an Automation Opportunity Backlog a prioritized pipeline of process improvements the AI team will deliver against
Conduct JTBD (Jobs To Be Done) analysis for each manual workflow to understand the root purpose before automating
iii. SOP Design & Governance
Design and document Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for all AI-augmented workflows covering normal operations exception handling escalation protocols and fallback procedures
Ensure SOPs are practical maintainable and actually followed by operations teams not just shelfware
Establish a quarterly SOP review cadence to incorporate lessons learned from production incidents and process changes
iv. Operational KPI Framework
Define instrument and track operational KPIs across all AI-augmented workflows:
SLA adherence rate (% of alarms/insights delivered within defined timeframes)
Automation rate (% of alarms handled without human intervention)
Triage turnaround time (mean time from alarm to resolution)
FTE liberation (hours/FTE equivalent freed through automation)
Model uptime (% availability of deployed AI models)
Inference latency (p50 p95 p99 response times for real-time models)
False positive/negative rates for alarm classification models
Build automated KPI dashboards (Power BI / Databricks) and publish weekly operational reports to leadership
v. Cross-Functional Process Alignment
Facilitate process alignment workshops between Operations Engineering Product and Field teams
Ensure AI outputs integrate seamlessly into existing operational tools (ServiceMax ECOLAB3D Salesforce)
Act as the process conscience of the AI team ensuring solutions are designed for the real operational context
vi. AIM Program Contribution
Contribute to EGICs AIM (AI Integration & Modernization) program by identifying chartering and executing rationalization and automation projects
Lead process discovery sessions for new AIM workstreams understanding current-state workflows before designing AI solutions
Track and report AIM impact metrics: FTE liberated hours saved error reduction customer impact
4B. AI / Data Science Technical Leadership
This is where your Data Science expertise drives technical vision. You will own the architectural integrity of all AI solutions ensuring they are not just accurate but production-grade scalable maintainable and cost-efficient. You must be hands-on enough to review code and architecture and strategic enough to choose the right battles.
i. AI/ML Model Design & Development
Lead the design development and deployment of ML/AI models for EGICs core industrial IoT use cases:
Alarm Auto-Classification: Multi-class models that classify prioritize and route alarms across Water Institutional and Pest products
Predictive Maintenance: Time-series models predicting asset failures (pumps controllers sensors) before they impact operations
Anomaly Detection: Unsupervised models detecting novel patterns in industrial telemetry data (water quality chemical dosing temperature conductivity)
NLP-Based Report Generation: LLM-powered systems auto-generating customer-facing reports business reviews and insight summaries
Agentic Automation: Multi-agent systems orchestrating complex operational workflows (alarm analysis recommendation delivery) with minimal human intervention
TVD Discovery: AI models scanning connected assets to identify quantify and dollarize value opportunities for customers
ii. Architecture Review & Governance
Review and approve ALL model architectures proposed by team members before development begins
Ensure correct architecture selection: batch vs. real-time inference cloud vs. edge deployment rule-based vs. ML vs. LLM-based approaches monolithic vs. microservices model serving
Maintain an Architecture Decision Record (ADR) documenting rationale behind key technical choices
Conduct monthly Architecture Review sessions where the team presents and defends design decisions
iii. GenAI LLM & Agentic AI
Lead evaluation and integration of GenAI technologies: RAG pipelines LLM-powered conversational agents agentic frameworks (LangChain LangGraph CrewAI)
Establish prompt engineering standards prompt versioning and LLM evaluation frameworks (hallucination rate relevance groundedness safety)
Ensure guardrails and governance for GenAI: compliance with Ecolab AI ethics data privacy and IP protections
iv. Data Engineering Collaboration
Work with Data Engineers to ensure clean reliable timely data pipelines feeding ML models
Define data contracts between data engineering and data science teams specifying schema SLAs and quality expectations
Oversee real-time streaming pipelines (Kafka / Azure Event Hubs) for time-sensitive use cases
v. Innovation & Emerging Technology
Stay current with AI/ML research; evaluate emerging technologies (multimodal AI Small Language Models Graph Neural Networks Reinforcement Learning Federated Learning)
Run structured PoC Pilot Production cycles for promising technologies
Present quarterly Technology Radar updates to leadership highlighting emerging capabilities and EGIC relevance
4C. Team Leadership & People Management
You will build lead and develop a team of 56 data scientists and AI engineers. This is not just task allocation its about creating a high-performing team culture where technical excellence ownership and continuous learning are the norm. You are expected to be a player-coach.
i. Team Building & Culture
Build a culture centered on: technical rigor ownership transparency continuous learning and collaborative problem-solving
Establish team rituals: daily standups weekly technical deep-dives monthly innovation hours quarterly retrospectives
Create a psychologically safe environment for experimentation fast failure and improvement
Foster knowledge sharing through internal tech talks code review sessions and documentation standards
ii. People Management
Conduct weekly/bi-weekly 1:1s covering project progress blockers career aspirations and wellbeing
Lead quarterly performance reviews aligned with Ecolabs VSEM framework
Create Individual Development Plans (IDPs) for each team member mapping skill gaps training and career progression
Handle team dynamics conflict resolution and performance improvement with empathy and professionalism
Participate in hiring: interviews candidate evaluation and onboarding of new team members
iii. Project & Delivery Management
Manage team capacity across 35 concurrent projects balancing business priority member growth and delivery timelines
Run Agile/Scrum sprint cycles (2-week sprints) with planning estimation execution and retrospective ceremonies
Maintain project portfolio dashboard: status milestones risks dependencies and resource allocation
Ensure every project has a clear charter: problem statement success criteria data requirements architecture timeline and ownership
iv. Upskilling & Professional Development
Drive structured upskilling: Databricks certifications Azure certifications LLM/GenAI training MLOps best practices soft skills development
Allocate 10% of sprint capacity for self-directed learning and experimentation
Encourage conference presentations blog posts and internal knowledge sharing
4D. Deployment Adoption & Production Triage
A model that works in a notebook but fails in production is not a success. This section ensures every AI solution survives and thrives in the real operational environment.
i. Production Deployment & Release Management
Every deployment follows a standardized release checklist:
Code review completed and approved
Unit tests and integration tests passing
Performance benchmarks met (accuracy latency throughput)
Data quality checks validated
Rollback plan documented and tested
Monitoring and alerting configured
Stakeholder sign-off obtained
Implement blue-green or canary deployment strategies for high-risk model updates
ii. Production Monitoring & Health
Build comprehensive monitoring dashboards: model performance data quality inference latency business impact infrastructure utilization
Configure automated alerting for performance degradation data drift concept drift and infrastructure issues
Publish weekly Production Health Report summarizing model status incidents and actions
iii. Incident Triage & Resolution
Establish and manage a structured triage process:
Severity Classification: P1 (critical customer impact 30-min response) P2 (high 2-hr response) P3 (medium 1 business day) P4 (low 1 week)
Mandatory Root Cause Analysis (RCA) for all P1 and P2 incidents with post-mortem documentation
Shared on-call rotation across 56 team members for after-hours P1/P2 incidents
Maintain incident knowledge base documenting past incidents root causes and resolutions
iv. Adoption Enablement
Drive adoption of AI solutions across operations ensure teams USE and TRUST AI outputs
Conduct training sessions and workshops for operations teams on interpreting and acting on AI insights
Create user guides quick-reference cards and FAQ documents for each deployed solution
Establish feedback loops: collect user feedback on accuracy / usability / trust; feed back into model improvement
Track adoption metrics: % of AI insights acted upon user satisfaction time-to-action
v. Documentation & Knowledge Management
Maintain comprehensive documentation: model cards API docs data dictionaries runbooks architecture diagrams
Ensure documentation is current searchable and accessible to all relevant stakeholders
5. Required Qualifications
5.1 Education
B.E. / in Computer Science Data Science Information Technology Chemical Engineering or related engineering discipline Required
M.S. / in Data Science AI/ML Statistics Applied Mathematics or Computational Engineering Preferred
MBA or PG Diploma in Business Analytics / Operations Management Strong plus for the BPA dimension
Valued Certifications:
Databricks Certified Data Scientist / ML Professional
Azure Data Scientist Associate (DP-100) / Azure AI Engineer Associate (AI-102)
Lean Six Sigma Green/Black Belt
PMP / PMI-ACP / Certified Scrum Master
5.2 Experience Breakdown
The ideal candidate has a blended career trajectory spanning three distinct capability areas:
Capability Area
Years
What We Expect
Demonstrated By
Business Process Analysis / Process Engineering
34 yrs
Workflow design process mapping (BPMN) SOP creation operational KPIs stakeholderinterviews gap analysis Lean/Six Sigma cross-functional facilitation
Process documentation portfolio efficiency metrics (% time saved error reduction) SOPsamples process audit reports
Data Science / AI Engineering / ML Engineering
34 yrs
Hands-on ML model building & production deployment ML lifecycle management cloud architecture (Azure/Databricks) GenAI/LLM development time-series analysis anomaly detection NLP MLOps
Production models deployed GitHub/code portfolio MLOps pipeline examples architecture decision records model performance dashboards
Team Leadership / People Management
12 yrs
Leading 3 technical professionals performance reviews sprint/project planning mentoring stakeholder management delivery ownership hiring participation
Team size managed projects delivered team member growth stakeholder testimonials delivery track record
5.3 Technical Skills Must Have
Category
Skill
Level
Context
Programming
Python
Expert
OOP Pandas NumPy scikit-learn XGBoost production coding unit testing
Programming
SQL & PySpark
Expert
Complex queries distributed processing Delta Lake operations
ML / AI
Classical ML
Expert
Classification regression clustering ensemble methods time-series
ML / AI
Deep Learning
Advanced
TensorFlow or PyTorch for production deployments
ML / AI
Anomaly Detection
Advanced
Isolation Forest autoencoders statistical methods core EGIC use case
ML / AI
NLP
Advanced
Text classification NER summarization sentiment analysis
MLOps
Databricks
Expert
MLflow Unity Catalog Feature Store Model Serving Delta Live Tables
MLOps
CI/CD for ML
Advanced
Azure DevOps pipelines automated testing model validation gates
Cloud
Azure
Advanced
ADF Databricks Azure ML Blob Storage Key Vault Azure DevOps
GenAI
LLM Frameworks
Advanced
LangChain LangGraph CrewAI agentic applications
GenAI
RAG Pipelines
Advanced
Vector DBs embedding models retrieval strategies chunking
GenAI
Prompt Engineering
Advanced
System prompts few-shot chain-of-thought prompt versioning
Visualization
Power BI / Streamlit
Advanced
Production dashboards DAX data modeling
Version Control
Git & Azure DevOps
Advanced
Branching strategies PRs code reviews
5.4 Technical Skills Nice to Have
Edge AI / IoT deployment (Raspberry Pi NVIDIA Jetson TensorFlow Lite ONNX Runtime)
Computer Vision for industrial applications (defect detection gauge reading visual inspection)
Databricks Apps Genie Spaces AI/BI Dashboards
Microsoft Copilot Studio Power Platform Power Automate
Snowflake (EGIC uses both Databricks and Snowflake)
Kubernetes / Docker for containerized ML model deployments
Agent-to-Agent (A2A) and Model Context Protocol (MCP) architectures
5.5 Domain Knowledge Critical
This role operates at the intersection of AI and industrial operations. Domain knowledge is not optional it is what separates a good data scientist from one who can deliver real impact at EGIC.
Industrial Water Treatment:Cooling tower chemistry boiler water management RO/membrane systems wastewater treatment chemical dosing corrosion/scale control. Understanding why parameters like conductivity pH ORP turbidity and cycles of concentration matter operationally.
IoT / Industrial Telemetry:Real-time sensor data from 3D TRASAR AIO controllers OMNI systems. Alarm management principles (ISA-18.2) sensor calibration and drift SCADA-level concepts. Understanding data flow from field devices through gateways to cloud.
24/7 Operations & Service Delivery:SLA-driven operations shift-based monitoring escalation protocols incident management (ITIL-aligned). Understanding the operational tempo and pressure of a global intelligence center.
Industry Preference:Experience at Nalco Water Ecolab Veolia Suez Xylem Kemira BASF Dow Honeywell Process Solutions Emerson or Schneider Electric is highly preferred.
Platform Familiarity:ECOLAB3D ServiceMax Salesforce or equivalent industrial IoT and field service platforms.
5.6 Soft Skills & Competencies
Leadership & Influence:Lead without authority influence cross-functional stakeholders drive alignment. Comfortable presenting to Director-level and above.
Communication Excellence:Explain complex AI/ML concepts to non-technical audiences. Strong written communication for docs reports and executive summaries.
Process-Oriented Mindset:Natural inclination to understand document and improve processes. Bias for systematic approaches over ad-hoc solutions.
Bias for Action:Make decisions with imperfect information. Preference for good enough now over perfect later especially in production triage.
Problem-Solving Under Pressure:Calm structured time-sensitive decision-making in production environments.
Cross-Functional Fluency:Fluent in technology operations and business languages. Can translate between all three seamlessly.
Growth Mindset:Genuine curiosity about new technologies willingness to learn adapt and teach others.
Required Experience:
Senior IC
About Company
Ecolab is the global leader in water, hygiene and energy technologies and services. Every day, we help make the world cleaner, safer and healthier – protecting people and vital resources.