About Us: At Molecular Connections, we believe in "Connecting brilliant minds, for building the future of scientific intelligence. Founded more than two decades ago, Molecular Connections is the leading AI-ML led data science organization accelerating digital transformation of Scientific Scholarly Publishing, STEM (science, technology, engineering and medical) and pharmaceutical data science/information/analytics domains, globally. Our marquee customer base is spread across US, UK, Europe and other geographies. Headquartered in Bengaluru, our technology and customer delivery centers are based across various tier 1 and tier 2 cities across south India. We are growing strongly both organically and inorganically with our latest technology-driven acquisitions in Germany and UK..
Role: Ass. Director/Director – Engineering Delivery
Cloud, NLP, ML, LLM, and GenAI models
Reporting & Stake Holders Management
- Reports to: Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
- Key Stakeholders:
- HoDs of Knowledge Work Teams (Editorial, Data Structuring, A&I, Tagging, Enrichment)
- Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)
- Finance & Resource Planning teams
- Quality Assurance & Customer Success teams
Key Responsibilities
Technology Solutions Implementation & Architecture
- Review implementation of end-to-end technology solutions for A&I, tagging, enrichment, and data structuring workflows, ensuring alignment with customer requirements and company technical standards.
- Lead the evaluation, selection, and deployment of Cloud infrastructure platforms that enable high availability, auto-scaling, and cost optimization for variable workloads.
- Define and enforce technology architecture standards for multi-tenant, multi-project environments supporting concurrent STEM publisher contracts.
- Oversee the integration of NLP, ML, LLM, and GenAI models into production workflows, ensuring reproducibility, governance, auditability, and performance optimization.
- Establish and maintain comprehensive solution documentation, including system design, deployment guides, runbooks, and troubleshooting protocols.
Delivery Capability & Resource Planning
- Assess and continuously optimize delivery capacity across teams to meet contractual SLAs and handle demand volatility.
- Develop and manage resource allocation strategies that balance technical expertise, project criticality, timeline, and cost, adapting to month-to-month volume fluctuations without compromising quality.
- Build predictive capacity models for both knowledge workers and engineering support, enabling proactive staffing and infrastructure provisioning.
- Oversee project scheduling, milestone tracking, and delivery timelines for PoCs, Production Go-Lives, Scaling initiatives, and ongoing Support.
- Partner with HoDs to identify bottlenecks, optimize workflow processes, and allocate specialized resources (e.g., Domain Experts, QA Engineers, DevOps) to high-impact initiatives.
Change Management & Continuous Improvement
- Champion a culture of continuous improvement by working with HoDs and knowledge worker teams to identify automation opportunities, eliminate manual handoffs, and increase operational efficiency.
- Lead change management initiatives when deploying new tools, platforms, or process improvements, ensuring minimal disruption and high adoption rates.
- Develop and deliver training programs and knowledge-sharing sessions to upskill teams on new technology capabilities, automation frameworks, and best practices.
- Establish feedback loops from production teams to engineering, ensuring that operational insights drive product and platform evolution.
- Drive metrics-driven decision-making by establishing clear KPIs for delivery, efficiency, quality, and cost; regularly reviewing performance with stakeholders.
Risk Mitigation & High Availability
- Identify, assess, and mitigate risks across all phases of solution delivery—from design through production, scaling, and support—including technical, operational, contractual, and compliance risks.
- Design and implement redundancy, failover mechanisms, and disaster recovery (DR) strategies to ensure 99.9%+ uptime SLAs for mission-critical systems.
- Lead root cause analysis (RCA) for critical failures, ensuring systematic remediation and knowledge capture.
- Proactively monitor system health, performance, and security posture using automated monitoring, alerting, and observability tools.
- Conduct regular DR drills and failover testing to validate recovery procedures.
AI/ML/LLM/GenAI Integration & Governance
- Lead the adoption of machine learning and generative AI models to automate knowledge work (e.g., auto-tagging, entity recognition, metadata enrichment, quality prediction).
- Establish ML Ops practices, including model versioning, performance tracking, retraining pipelines, and A/B testing frameworks.
- Ensure AI model governance, including explainability, bias detection, and audit trails for compliance and customer transparency.
- Work with data engineering and data science teams to prepare training data, validate model outputs, and integrate models into production workflows.
- Balance innovation with stability—managing the transition from experimental (PoC) models to production-grade systems with SLA guarantees.
Security, Compliance & Privacy
- Partner with CISO and Compliance teams to ensure all technology solutions meet ISO 27001:2022, ISO 27701:2025 standards and customer-specific security requirements.
- Conduct or oversee regular security audits, penetration testing, and vulnerability assessments; remediate findings on schedule.
- Implement privacy-by-design principles in all systems, ensuring data minimization, encryption, access controls, and audit logging.
- Maintain and regularly test data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity plans.
- Lead security training for engineering and support teams; foster a culture of security awareness.
Integration with 3rd Party Systems & APIs
- Design and oversee integrations with customer publishing platforms, vendor systems (ScholarOne, Morressier, Altmetric, Crossref, etc.), and internal systems (DSS, MCAcademy etc).
- Establish API standards, versioning, rate-limiting, and security practices.
- Manage vendor relationships and SLA compliance with critical partners.
- Ensure robust error handling, monitoring, and alerting for integrated workflows.
Production Support & Scalability
- Establish 24/7/365 production support processes, including on-call rotations, escalation paths, and SLA-driven response times.
- Define and implement monitoring, logging, and observability strategies to detect and resolve issues proactively.
- Build playbooks and knowledge bases for common operational scenarios, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR).
- Lead Scaling initiatives when customer demand increases, ensuring infrastructure, staffing, processes, and quality control scale in parallel.
- Conduct post-implementation reviews (PIRs) after major milestones (Go-Live, Scaling) to capture lessons learned and continuously improve.
Feedback Management & Customer Success
- Prioritize and triage feedback into product roadmap, training needs, or process improvements.
- Work closely with Customer Success and Account Management teams to ensure contractual commitments are met and exceeded.
- Conduct regular business reviews with customers and internal stakeholders to assess satisfaction, identify improvement opportunities, and align on roadmap priorities.
Invoicing, SLA Tracking & Financial Stewardship
- Collaborate with Finance to ensure accurate tracking of billable metrics, resource utilization, and cost allocation across projects.
- Maintain transparent SLA dashboards and reporting, communicating performance against contractual commitments.
- Develop business cases for technology investments, demonstrating ROI through improved efficiency, reduced defects, or enhanced capacity.
- Drive cost optimization initiatives (e.g., cloud cost reduction, automation savings, reduced manual labor) while maintaining quality.
Required Qualifications & Skills:
Experience:
15+ years of progressive technology leadership, with ≥5 years managing engineering delivery teams.Technical Expertise:
Deep, hands-on expertise in Cloud Architecture (Azure/AWS/GCP), DevOps/CI/CD (Terraform, Kubernetes), ML Ops, Security (ISO 27001/27701), and designing scalable systems for high-volume data processing.Domain (Preferred):
Experience in STM/Scholarly Publishing, KPO, or Content Services is strongly valued.Leadership:
Strategic thinking, strong people leadership (mentoring/scaling teams), cross-functional collaboration, and exceptional communication skills to manage C-suite and customer expectations.
Why Join Molecular Connections?
This is a unique opportunity to join a mission-driven company at a pivotal time in its growth in building the next-generation scientific intelligence platform. You will be a key part of our vision to "build the future of scientific intelligence," with a clear path for professional growth and a chance to make a lasting impact on our organization and a competitive remuneration with other benefits commensurate with candidates’ experience and track record.
