Functional Engineer AI

AkzoNobel seeks a Functional Engineer AI in Pune, India, to design, develop, deploy and improve enterprise-grade agentic AI and intelligent automation solutions. The role translates business needs into scalable AI products and services using Azure AI platforms, large language models, orchestration frameworks and application technologies. The posting identifies the position as permanent, with 40 working hours per week.

Responsibilities

• Translate business objectives and stakeholder requirements into functional and technical designs, user stories, acceptance criteria and implementation plans. Work with business teams, architects and delivery stakeholders to align solutions with enterprise priorities.
• Support end-to-end delivery of AI workflows, reasoning agents, RAG pipelines, APIs, enterprise integrations, automation components and React.js user interfaces. Follow architecture, security, governance, documentation, coding, testing and deployment standards; contribute to solution approvals and production readiness.
• Define and execute tests for autonomous systems, reasoning loops, safety guardrails and integrations. Support functional and business acceptance testing, and assess observability, traceability, model performance and human-in-the-loop controls.
• Monitor production solutions for performance, security, reliability and compliance. Investigate hallucinations, orchestration and integration failures, and degraded model behavior; coordinate fixes and improve monitoring and automation.
• Support planning, estimation, documentation and stakeholder communication across Agile, DevOps or waterfall projects.

Qualifications and experience:

• A bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, Data Science or a related discipline.
• Experience expectations vary by MM1–MM3 maturity level: 0–1 years for entry-level engineering profiles through 6+ years for advanced engineering and leadership-oriented levels. Responsibilities progress from supporting development and issue resolution to leading complex initiatives, mentoring engineers and contributing to governance and safety standards.
• Strong Python, AI application engineering and enterprise integration expertise; working knowledge of React.js, Node.js, REST APIs, Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Agent Service, Semantic Kernel, RAG, vector databases and cloud-native development. Experience with CI/CD, MLOps, model monitoring, observability, automated testing, DevOps and Agile practices, plus the ability to evaluate model quality and optimize solutions for performance, security and scalability.