Director Data Science

About the Team   Our Data Science team is the Avengers to Meesho’s S.H.I.E.L.D 🛡️. And why not? We are the ones who assemble during the toughest challenges and devise creative solutions, building intelligent systems for millions of our users looking at a thousand different categories of products. We’ve barely scratched the surface, and have amazing challenges in charting the future of commerce for Bharat.     About the role  Are you a strategic thinker with a passion for solving large-scale problems using data? Do you enjoy mentoring high-performing teams and building ML systems that directly impact millions of users? We're looking for a Director - Data Science to lead a team of skilled data scientists in building intelligent systems that power Meesho’s next phase of growth. In this role, you’ll own the data science roadmap for a key business charter, guiding the team through ambiguity and complexity to deliver production-grade ML solutions. You’ll work closely with product, tech, and business leaders to translate complex challenges into scalable, measurable, and impactful outcomes. As a people and technical leader, you’ll ensure model efficiency, system reliability, and scientific excellence while fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

What You Will Do • Lead, grow, and mentor a high-performing team of data scientists..

• Own all data science systems and models in your charter — from strategy to deployment and monitoring.

• Collaborate with senior product, engineering, and business leaders to define and prioritize impactful AI/ML initiatives.

• Represent Data Science in senior leadership discussions and clearly communicate technical strategies, investment decisions, trade-offs, and business impact.

• Drive platformization, system architecture decisions, and ML lifecycle improvements across the charter.

• Ensure model scalability, performance, and cost efficiency, while upholding best practices in experimentation and statistical rigor.

• Guide the team in reading and implementing state-of-the-art research, and facilitate build vs. buy decisions.

• Lead RCA for critical production issues and improve system observability, documentation, and service uptime.

What You Will Need • Master’s degree (PhD preferred) in Machine Learning, Statistics, Computer Science, or a related quantitative field.

• 10+ years of experience in Data Science or Analytics, with at least 6 years of people management experience.

• Strong research background and knowledge of state of art in AI / ML.

• Proven track record of building and deploying ML models in production at scale.

• Experience managing teams of 20+ data scientists and delivering across cross-functional charters.

• Deep expertise in ML algorithms, experimental design, and performance monitoring.

• Strong coding skills (Python, SQL) and familiarity with Big Data technologies like Spark, Hive, or Redshift.

• Ability to translate business needs into technical solutions, prioritize roadmaps, and estimate effort accurately.

• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills with a bias for action and clarity in execution.

• Strong experience in building large scale AI/ML applications for areas such as recommendations systems, ranking, retrieval, search etc

Bonus Points For

• Experience leading ML initiatives in B2C or e-commerce settings.

• Contributions to internal tools, open-source libraries, or research publications.

• Strong understanding of ML system performance trade-offs — latency, cost, and throughput.

• Top tier research Publications in the areas of AI and ML, especially in recsys, IR and knowledge discovery.