Scientist

Ecolab


Job Location:

Pune - India

Monthly Salary: Not Disclosed
Posted on: Yesterday
Vacancies: 1 Vacancy

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

Connected Assets600000 across 40 industries globallyDigital Products Powered13 (WQ IQ CIP IQ Aqua IQ Dish IQ Pest Intelligence Kitchen IQ HX IQ and more)Digital Revenue Enabled$370M annuallyData Points Processed250 billion per year from industrial IoT controllersTeam Size150 domain experts across 6 ...

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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.

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