Functional Engineer AI

AkzoNobel seeks a Functional Engineer AI in Pune, India, for a permanent, 40-hour-per-week role designing, developing, deploying and improving enterprise-grade agentic AI and intelligent automation solutions. The role combines functional and technical AI engineering: translating business needs into scalable AI products and services, with an emphasis on secure, reliable and observable systems.

Responsibilities

• Turn 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.
• Deliver AI workflows, reasoning agents, RAG pipelines, enterprise integrations, APIs, automation components and React.js interfaces using Azure AI services and orchestration frameworks. Follow architecture, security, governance, documentation, coding, testing and deployment standards; contribute to approvals and production readiness.
• Define and carry out tests for autonomous systems, reasoning loops, safety guardrails and integrations. Support functional and business acceptance testing, and assess traceability, observability and model performance.
• Monitor production performance, security, reliability and compliance. Investigate hallucinations, orchestration and integration failures, and degraded model behavior; coordinate fixes and improve monitoring dashboards.
• Support planning, estimation, documentation, stakeholder communication and delivery through Agile, DevOps or waterfall methods.

Qualifications and experience:

• 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 classification: 0–1 years for entry-level profiles through 6+ years for advanced or leadership-oriented levels.
• Strong Python development, 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, orchestration frameworks and cloud-native development.
• Experience with CI/CD, MLOps, model monitoring, observability, automated testing, DevOps and Agile practices. Ability to evaluate model quality, implement human-in-the-loop controls, investigate reasoning failures and optimize solutions for performance, security and scalability. At advanced levels, expectations include leading complex initiatives, mentoring engineers and contributing to governance and safety standards.