Sr.Data Scientist
Job Description
Connected Assets
600,000+ across 40+ industries globally
Digital Products Powered
13 (WQ IQ, CIP IQ, Aqua IQ, Dish IQ, Pest Intelligence, Kitchen IQ, HX IQ, and more)
Digital Revenue Enabled
$370M+ annually
Data Points Processed
250+ billion per year from industrial IoT controllers
Team Size
150+ domain experts across 6 global locations
Global Locations
Pune (India), Naperville (USA), Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), and 3 additional sites
Alarm Automation Rate
88% and growing through AI-driven transformation
TVD Generated
$22M in 2025, on track for $100M+ in 2026
EGIC 2.0 Transformation Context
AIM (AI Integration & Modernization): Embedding AI across all EGIC workflows — automating reactive alarm triage, building predictive intelligence, and liberating 25–30 FTE-equivalent capacity through agentic automation.
APEX (Adoption, Proactive Engagement & eXpansion): Driving digital adoption, converting hardware-only customers to digital subscribers, and scaling TVD from $22M to $100M+ through proactive customer engagement.
You will lead AI operations for one of the largest industrial IoT intelligence centers in the world — 600K+ connected assets, 250B+ data points/year
Your models will directly impact water conservation, energy efficiency, and sustainability outcomes for customers across 40+ industries globally
You will have end-to-end ownership: from identifying the business problem (BPA lens) → designing the AI solution (DS lens) → deploying and scaling it (Ops lens) → measuring its impact (Leadership lens)
You will build and shape a team from a position of influence — defining the culture, technical standards, and the operational playbook
Direct visibility to EGIC Director and senior leadership — your work directly drives strategic decisions and commercial outcomes ($100M+ TVD target)
Cutting-edge technology: Databricks, Azure, LLMs, agentic AI, RAG pipelines, edge computing, real-time IoT streaming
NOT a pure research/academic role — we need production engineers, not just experimenters
NOT a people-only management role — you must be technically hands-on and review architecture decisions
NOT a single-project role — you will manage a portfolio of 3–5 concurrent AI projects across different digital products
NOT isolated from the business — you will regularly interact with Operations, Product, Engineering, Field, and Customer-facing teams
Map all EGIC operational workflows across 13 digital products — from data ingestion → alarm generation → triage → insight creation → customer delivery → value capture (TVD)
Identify human touchpoints, decision nodes, escalation paths, and handoff points in each workflow
Quantify time spent, error rates, and throughput at each process step to identify automation ROI
Use BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) or equivalent tools to create standardized, version-controlled process documentation
Systematically identify and prioritize automation candidates using a structured scoring framework (Impact × Feasibility × Urgency)
Distinguish between rule-based automation (RPA), ML-based automation (predictive models), and agentic automation (LLM-powered agents) — recommending the right approach for each use case
Build and maintain an "Automation Opportunity Backlog" — a prioritized pipeline of process improvements the AI team will deliver against
Conduct JTBD (Jobs To Be Done) analysis for each manual workflow to understand the root purpose before automating
Design and document Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for all AI-augmented workflows — covering normal operations, exception handling, escalation protocols, and fallback procedures
Ensure SOPs are practical, maintainable, and actually followed by operations teams — not just shelfware
Establish a quarterly SOP review cadence to incorporate lessons learned from production incidents and process changes
SLA adherence rate (% of alarms/insights delivered within defined timeframes)
Automation rate (% of alarms handled without human intervention)
Triage turnaround time (mean time from alarm to resolution)
FTE liberation (hours/FTE equivalent freed through automation)
Model uptime (% availability of deployed AI models)
Inference latency (p50, p95, p99 response times for real-time models)
False positive/negative rates for alarm classification models
Build automated KPI dashboards (Power BI / Databricks) and publish weekly operational reports to leadership
Facilitate process alignment workshops between Operations, Engineering, Product, and Field teams
Ensure AI outputs integrate seamlessly into existing operational tools (ServiceMax, ECOLAB3D, Salesforce)
Act as the "process conscience" of the AI team — ensuring solutions are designed for the real operational context
Contribute to EGIC's AIM (AI Integration & Modernization) program by identifying, chartering, and executing rationalization and automation projects
Lead process discovery sessions for new AIM workstreams — understanding current-state workflows before designing AI solutions
Track and report AIM impact metrics: FTE liberated, hours saved, error reduction, customer impact
Alarm Auto-Classification: Multi-class models that classify, prioritize, and route alarms across Water, Institutional, and Pest products
Predictive Maintenance: Time-series models predicting asset failures (pumps, controllers, sensors) before they impact operations
Anomaly Detection: Unsupervised models detecting novel patterns in industrial telemetry data (water quality, chemical dosing, temperature, conductivity)
NLP-Based Report Generation: LLM-powered systems auto-generating customer-facing reports, business reviews, and insight summaries
Agentic Automation: Multi-agent systems orchestrating complex operational workflows (alarm → analysis → recommendation → delivery) with minimal human intervention
TVD Discovery: AI models scanning connected assets to identify, quantify, and dollarize value opportunities for customers
Review and approve ALL model architectures proposed by team members before development begins
Ensure correct architecture selection: batch vs. real-time inference, cloud vs. edge deployment, rule-based vs. ML vs. LLM-based approaches, monolithic vs. microservices model serving
Maintain an Architecture Decision Record (ADR) documenting rationale behind key technical choices
Conduct monthly "Architecture Review" sessions where the team presents and defends design decisions
Lead evaluation and integration of GenAI technologies: RAG pipelines, LLM-powered conversational agents, agentic frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI)
Establish prompt engineering standards, prompt versioning, and LLM evaluation frameworks (hallucination rate, relevance, groundedness, safety)
Ensure guardrails and governance for GenAI: compliance with Ecolab AI ethics, data privacy, and IP protections
Work with Data Engineers to ensure clean, reliable, timely data pipelines feeding ML models
Define data contracts between data engineering and data science teams — specifying schema, SLAs, and quality expectations
Oversee real-time streaming pipelines (Kafka / Azure Event Hubs) for time-sensitive use cases
Stay current with AI/ML research; evaluate emerging technologies (multimodal AI, Small Language Models, Graph Neural Networks, Reinforcement Learning, Federated Learning)
Run structured PoC → Pilot → Production cycles for promising technologies
Present quarterly "Technology Radar" updates to leadership highlighting emerging capabilities and EGIC relevance
Build a culture centered on: technical rigor, ownership, transparency, continuous learning, and collaborative problem-solving
Establish team rituals: daily standups, weekly technical deep-dives, monthly innovation hours, quarterly retrospectives
Create a psychologically safe environment for experimentation, fast failure, and improvement
Foster knowledge sharing through internal tech talks, code review sessions, and documentation standards
Conduct weekly/bi-weekly 1:1s — covering project progress, blockers, career aspirations, and wellbeing
Lead quarterly performance reviews aligned with Ecolab's VSEM framework
Create Individual Development Plans (IDPs) for each team member — mapping skill gaps, training, and career progression
Handle team dynamics, conflict resolution, and performance improvement with empathy and professionalism
Participate in hiring: interviews, candidate evaluation, and onboarding of new team members
Manage team capacity across 3–5 concurrent projects — balancing business priority, member growth, and delivery timelines
Run Agile/Scrum sprint cycles (2-week sprints) with planning, estimation, execution, and retrospective ceremonies
Maintain project portfolio dashboard: status, milestones, risks, dependencies, and resource allocation
Ensure every project has a clear charter: problem statement, success criteria, data requirements, architecture, timeline, and ownership
Drive structured upskilling: Databricks certifications, Azure certifications, LLM/GenAI training, MLOps best practices, soft skills development
Allocate 10% of sprint capacity for self-directed learning and experimentation
Encourage conference presentations, blog posts, and internal knowledge sharing
Code review completed and approved
Unit tests and integration tests passing
Performance benchmarks met (accuracy, latency, throughput)
Data quality checks validated
Rollback plan documented and tested
Monitoring and alerting configured
Stakeholder sign-off obtained
Implement blue-green or canary deployment strategies for high-risk model updates
Build comprehensive monitoring dashboards: model performance, data quality, inference latency, business impact, infrastructure utilization
Configure automated alerting for performance degradation, data drift, concept drift, and infrastructure issues
Publish weekly "Production Health Report" summarizing model status, incidents, and actions
Severity Classification: P1 (critical — customer impact, 30-min response), P2 (high — 2-hr response), P3 (medium — 1 business day), P4 (low — 1 week)
Mandatory Root Cause Analysis (RCA) for all P1 and P2 incidents with post-mortem documentation
Shared on-call rotation across 5–6 team members for after-hours P1/P2 incidents
Maintain incident knowledge base documenting past incidents, root causes, and resolutions
Drive adoption of AI solutions across operations — ensure teams USE and TRUST AI outputs
Conduct training sessions and workshops for operations teams on interpreting and acting on AI insights
Create user guides, quick-reference cards, and FAQ documents for each deployed solution
Establish feedback loops: collect user feedback on accuracy / usability / trust; feed back into model improvement
Track adoption metrics: % of AI insights acted upon, user satisfaction, time-to-action
Maintain comprehensive documentation: model cards, API docs, data dictionaries, runbooks, architecture diagrams
Ensure documentation is current, searchable, and accessible to all relevant stakeholders
This role is central to both programs — the candidate will lead the AI team that powers AIM and provides the intelligence backbone for APEX.
3. Role Summary
3.1 The Opportunity
We are looking for aSr AI Engineer— a rare hybrid professional who combines deep business process understanding with advanced AI/Data Science technical expertise and proven people leadership. This individual will lead a team of 5–6 data scientists and AI engineers, driving the daily AI operations, projectdelivery, model deployment, adoption enablement, and production triage across EGIC's entire digital product portfolio.
3.2 What Makes This Role Unique
3.3 This Role Is NOT
4. Key Responsibilities
4A. Business Process Analysis & Operations Leadership
i. End-to-End Process Mapping & Analysis
ii. Automation Opportunity Identification
iii. SOP Design & Governance
iv. Operational KPI Framework
Define, instrument, and track operational KPIs across all AI-augmented workflows:
v. Cross-Functional Process Alignment
vi. AIM Program Contribution
4B. AI / Data Science Technical Leadership
i. AI/ML Model Design & Development
Lead the design, development, and deployment of ML/AI models for EGIC's core industrial IoT use cases:
ii. Architecture Review & Governance
iii. GenAI, LLM & Agentic AI
iv. Data Engineering Collaboration
v. Innovation & Emerging Technology
4C. Team Leadership & People Management
i. Team Building & Culture
ii. People Management
iii. Project & Delivery Management
iv. Upskilling & Professional Development
4D. Deployment, Adoption & Production Triage
i. Production Deployment & Release Management
Every deployment follows a standardized release checklist:
ii. Production Monitoring & Health
iii. Incident Triage & Resolution
Establish and manage a structured triage process:
iv. Adoption Enablement
v. Documentation & Knowledge Management
5. Require...