Data and Gen AI Practice Lead

Role summary

Merke is soliciting applications for the position of a leader for out Data & GenAI practice focused on front-end functions—sales, marketing, and growth. You will be the player-coach who defines the strategy, hires and leads a multi-disciplinary team, builds accelerators/IP, shapes solutions and POCs, drives GTM with partners, and ensures production-grade delivery for enterprise clients.

What you’ll do

Practice leadership & strategy

• Define the practice vision, service catalog, and roadmap across: LLM apps/copilots/agents, RAG over marketing & sales knowledge, decisioning/propensity, recommendations, experimentation & uplift modeling, identity & consent-aware activation.
• Publish reference architectures for front-office stacks (CDP/CRM ↔ GenAI services ↔ channels) and delivery playbooks (SOW templates, estimations, QA/eval harnesses, runbooks).

Solutioning & POCs (front-office)

• Lead discovery and solution design with commercial guardrails (CAC/LTV, conversion, AOV, churn, media ROI etc).
• Startup up a

  Solutions Lab

  for rapid POCs that graduate to production (clear success metrics, latency/SLOs, cost-per-request, safety/guardrails).
• Own build vs. buy decisions across hyperscalers and ISVs

• GTM, partnerships & revenue

• Package offerings/accelerators, create demos and case studies; enable Sales with qualification guides and ROI calculators.
• Co-sell with cloud/ISV partners; manage partner tiers/MDF; shape and lead proposals/RFPs with clear commercials (T&M/fixed/managed).

Delivery & governance

• Oversee end-to-end delivery from discovery → design → build → deploy → operate; enforce SLAs/SLOs, change control, and cost governance.
• Establish

  MLOps/LLMOps

  : CI/CD for data/models/prompts, vector index pipelines, eval harnesses (factuality, toxicity, bias), telemetry, rollback.
• Implement privacy, security, and Responsible AI: consent handling, PII redaction, audit trails; align with GDPR/DPDP/PCI/RBI where applicable.

People leadership

• Hire and mentor Solution Architects, GenAI/ML Engineers, Retrieval/Prompt/Eval Engineers, Data Engineers (activation-oriented), and Engagement Managers.
• Build a hands-on, outcome-driven culture; review designs, unblock delivery, and raise the technical bar.

Minimum qualifications

• 12+ years in data/ML/AI with 5+ years leading delivery/consulting/tech teams; proven practice/P&L ownership.
• Demonstrated wins delivering

  front-office

  AI (sales/marketing/growth) in BFSI, Auto, or Retail/E-com is a good to have
• Architecture depth across:

• GenAI/LLM apps:

  RAG, tool-use/agents, prompt/retrieval optimization, eval/guardrails; vector DBs (pgvector/FAISS/Pinecone, etc.); orchestration (LangChain/LlamaIndex or equivalent).

• Activation stack:

  CDPs (Salesforce Data Cloud/Adobe RTCDP/Treasure Data), CRMs (Salesforce/MS Dynamics), MAPs (SFMC/Adobe/Braze), ad APIs (Google/Meta), MMPs.

• Data/infra:

  Databricks/Spark, Snowflake/BigQuery, Kafka/Kinesis, dbt; microservices, K8s/containers, CI/CD, secrets/KMS.
• Presales excellence: discovery, solution shaping, SOWs/pricing, stakeholder management, and C-suite communication.