Role for an AI/ML Engineer at a well-funded early-stage AI startup in Bangalore. Work directly with founders, build across LLMs, agentic AI, voice AI, and multimodal reasoning. Requires 2–5 years startup experience and top-tier IIT pedigree.

About the Company

Tribe Catalyst is hiring on behalf of a well-funded, early-stage AI startup based in Bangalore. The startup is building foundational AI products with a lean, high-caliber founding team of five engineers. Backed by significant venture capital, the company focuses on cutting-edge AI applications including Large Language Models (LLMs), voice AI, and multimodal reasoning. The culture emphasizes ownership, speed, and direct collaboration with founders, offering an environment where engineers shape core product decisions from day one.

Role Overview

We are looking for an AI/ML Engineer to join the early engineering team of this fast-growing AI startup. This is a high-ownership role for engineers who thrive on building AI systems from the ground up. You will work across the entire AI stack—from designing agentic workflows to deploying production-grade voice and multimodal systems. The role offers direct exposure to founders, minimal management layers, and the chance to turn ideas into scalable products. Ideal candidates have 2–5 years of startup experience and a strong academic pedigree from top IITs or equivalent institutions (UG degree from one of the top 10 IITs, IIIT Hyderabad, NIT Trichy, BITS Pilani, CMI, or ISI Kolkata). A JEE rank below 5,000 is required as an eligibility criterion.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and deploy production-grade AI systems from concept to deployment.
• Develop applications powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), including prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and RAG.
• Design and implement agentic AI workflows that enable autonomous decision-making.
• Work on Voice AI systems for natural voice interactions, including speech-to-text and text-to-speech pipelines.
• Explore multimodal reasoning across text, image, and audio inputs.
• Build AI evaluation frameworks to measure quality, reliability, and safety of AI outputs.
• Contribute to personalization engines that adapt product behavior to user preferences.
• Solve complex technical problems across the AI and product stack, from data pipelines to inference optimization.
• Work closely with founders on core AI and product decisions, taking substantial ownership of entire features.
• Maintain and improve infrastructure for fast iteration, including cloud compute, CI/CD, and monitoring.

Tech Stack

• Large Language Models (LLMs): GPT, Claude, open-source models (Llama, Mistral)
• Agentic AI / AI Agents: LangChain, AutoGPT, custom agent frameworks
• Voice AI: Speech-to-Text (Whisper), Text-to-Speech (ElevenLabs, Azure Cognitive Services)
• Multimodal AI: Vision-language models (CLIP, LLaVA), audio+text fusion
• AI Evaluation: Evals (LangSmith, custom metrics), A/B testing, hallucination detection
• Personalization: Collaborative filtering, embedding-based recommendation systems
• Programming & Infrastructure: Python, PyTorch/TensorFlow, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS/GCP, FastAPI

Requirements

• 2–5 years of relevant experience in AI/ML engineering at a startup.
• UG degree from one of the top 10 IITs (or equivalent institutes: IIIT Hyderabad, NIT Trichy, IIT (BHU), BITS Pilani, CMI, ISI Kolkata).
• JEE rank below 5,000.
• Strong programming and problem-solving skills with Python.
• Hands-on experience building AI systems in production.
• Expertise in at least one of: LLMs, agentic AI, voice AI, multimodal AI.
• Ability to deploy and maintain production-grade AI solutions.
• Strong sense of ownership and independent execution.
• Comfortable in a fast-paced, early-stage startup environment.

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