Data and Gen AI Practice Lead

As a leader for Merke's Data & GenAI practice, your role will be crucial in focusing on front-end functions such as sales, marketing, and growth. You will be responsible for defining the strategy, hiring and leading a multi-disciplinary team, building accelerators/IP, shaping solutions and POCs, driving GTM with partners, and ensuring production-grade delivery for enterprise clients. **Key Responsibilities:** - Define the practice vision, service catalog, and roadmap for 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). - Lead discovery and solution design with commercial guardrails (CAC/LTV, conversion, AOV, churn, media ROI etc). - Establish a Solutions Lab for rapid POCs that graduate to production with clear success metrics, latency/SLOs, cost-per-request, safety/guardrails. - Make build vs. buy decisions across hyperscalers and ISVs. - 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). - Oversee end-to-end delivery from discovery to design to build to deploy to operate; enforce SLAs/SLOs, change control, and cost governance. - Implement MLOps/LLMOps: CI/CD for data/models/prompts, vector index pipelines, eval harnesses (factuality, toxicity, bias), telemetry, rollback. - Ensure privacy, security, and Responsible AI: consent handling, PII redaction, audit trails; align with GDPR/DPDP/PCI/RBI where applicable. - Hire and mentor Solution Architects, GenAI/ML Engineers, Retrieval/Prompt/Eval Engineers, Data Engineers (activation-oriented), and Engagement Managers. - Foster a hands-on, outcome-driven culture; review designs, unblock delivery, and raise the technical bar. **Qualifications Required:** - 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, activation stack, data/infra, and presales excellence. Please note: Architecture depth across GenAI/LLM apps, activation stack, data/infra, and presales excellence are minimum qualifications required for this position.,