Senior Manager Data Science

Freshworks is looking for a strategic and technically proficient Senior Manager in our Applied AI team. This team serves as the Architects of Excellence for every AI initiative within the company. You will lead a high-impact squad of around 10 Data Scientists and AI Engineers responsible for ensuring that our AI agents and models are performant secure and continuously evolving.

As the primary stakeholder for AI design and deployment your teams mission is to bridge the gap between experimental AI and industrial-grade customer-ready products. You will oversee the entire lifecycle of AI excellencefrom initial design sign-offs and sophisticated evaluation frameworks to advanced model optimization and MLOps.

Responsibilities

Team Leadership & Governance

• Lead and mentor a team of around 10 Data Scientists and AI Engineers fostering a culture of technical rigor and continuous innovation.

• Act as the primary stakeholder for all AI activities across the organization reviewing architectural designs and providing the final technical sign-off.

• Define and enforce standards for model selection strategies and effective prompting to ensure AI use cases are solved with the right tool for the job.

Evaluation & Quality Engineering

• Own the end-to-end Evaluation (Eval) strategy for AI use cases.

• Architect and implement robust frameworks for both build-time evals and production-time evals to enable data-driven continuous learning loops.

• Monitor production metrics for AI deployments (agents models and prompts) to identify and execute improvements.

Model Optimization & Compliance

• Drive the creation of top-tier models through fine-tuning distillation and Reinforcement Learning (RL) to achieve the optimal balance of price performance and power (reasoning).

• Ensure all models are secure and that data training pipelines remain strictly compliant with global data privacy standards.

MLOps & Deployment Excellence

• Oversee sophisticated deployment strategies including shadow testing A/B testing and gradual rollouts.

• Manage rollback protocols and conduct deep-dive field performance analysis of AI Agents to ensure seamless user experiences.

Qualifications :

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelors degree in Computer Science Engineering or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience).

• Experience: 10 years of professional experience in AI/ML with 2 years in Agentic AI

• Leadership: Minimum of 3 years in a formal people management role with a proven track record of scaling and mentoring technical teams.

• Domain Expertise: Deep understanding of Large Language Models (LLMs) Generative AI lifecycles and traditional ML foundations.

Skills Inventory

Required Skills

• Model Engineering: Proficiency in model fine-tuning distillation techniques and RL/RLHF.

• Evaluation Frameworks: Expertise in building automated eval pipelines for LLMs (e.g. using Arize RAGAS DeepEval or custom benchmarking).

• MLOps Mastery: Practical experience with shadow deployments A/B testing and managing production AI agents at scale.

• Strategic Prompting: Advanced knowledge of prompt engineering patterns (Chain of Thought ReAct etc.).

• Security & Compliance: Strong grasp of AI security vulnerabilities (prompt injection data leakage) and data compliance (GDPR/SOC2).

Good-to-Have Skills

• Infrastructure: Familiarity with cloud-native AI infrastructure (AWS Bedrock Azure AI or GCP Vertex AI).

• Resource Optimization: Experience in optimizing models for Power (reasoning capability) vs. Price (token cost) vs. Performance (latency).

• Product Thinking: Ability to translate complex AI metrics into business impact and customer satisfaction scores.

Public Contribution: Active participation in the AI research community or contributions to open-source AI projects.

Additional Information :

At Freshworks we have fostered an environment that enables everyone to find their true potential purpose and passion welcoming colleagues of all backgrounds genders sexual orientations religions and ethnicities. We are committed to providing equal opportunity and believe that diversity in the workplace creates a more vibrant richer environment that boosts the goals of our employees communities and business. Fresh vision. Real impact. Come build it with us.

Remote Work :

No

Employment Type :

Full-time