Job Opportunity for Machine Learning Scientist (Computer Vision) at Wadhwani AI

We are hiring at all levels of our AI team to support and lead our growth, including ML Scientists and Senior and Principal ML Scientists. These roles are commensurate with experience and will be evaluated on an individual basis.

ML Scientists at Wadhwani AI build scientifically rigorous and robustly evaluated AI solutions that will be deployed in order to bring AI to the benefit of underserved billions across the developing world.

ABOUT US

Wadhwani AI is a non-profit applied AI institute that brings artificial intelligence technologies to address social challenges in low and middle-income countries. Through our solutions, AI becomes an enabling technology that bridges the gap between problems and solutions, augments human capabilities and provides advanced decision support. We collaborate with social sector organisations, the government, domain experts and academic institutions to identify real-world challenges, create and deploy innovative AI solutions to reach intended users and beneficiaries – with the objective of creating sustainable, scalable impact.

Currently, we are building AI-based solutions in the agriculture and health domains, such as pest management, maternal, newborn and child health, and tuberculosis; and are looking to expand to other domains such as education and climate change soon.

Our projects are supported by leading philanthropies such as Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), and Google.org.

A few of our accolades are as follows:

• Wadhwani AI was the only Google AI impact challenge winner from India in 2019, and the first organisation in Asia Pacific to welcome a cohort of Google Fellows.
• Our pest management solution, CottonAce earned an honourable mention at the Fast Company World Changing Awards 2021, while our baby anthropometry solution, Visual Weighing Machine, won the Best World Changing Ideas in the APAC region.
• In April 2022, CottonAce was announced as one of the five winners of the Global Change Award (GCA) in 2022. The Global Change Award is an endeavour by the H&M Foundation to transform fashion and turn the entire industry planet positive. 

ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

As an ML Scientist, you will be responsible for building machine learning solutions to problems of societal importance, and mentoring other team members in this effort. You will participate in problem definition and the development and execution of algorithms and solutions to the problems. Specific to this role in Computer Vision, you will work on various problems ranging from 3D vision to medical imaging to classic tasks such as object detection and segmentation with specific applications, and tackling real world challenges of out-of-distribution data and domain shift.

In order to apply machine learning and related technologies for social good, you will need to understand user challenges and their context, curate and transform data, train and validate models, run simulations, and broadly derive insights from data. In doing so, you will work in cross-functional teams spanning engineering, solutions, domain experts, and designers. You will also work closely with social sector organisations, and are encouraged to collaborate with researchers across the world.

You will be encouraged to drive fundamental advances to the technology domains themselves as part of the efforts towards their application, present your work in technical and other forums of interest, and publish in leading conferences and journals.

At Wadhwani AI, excellence as an individual contributor goes hand-in-hand with good teamwork and collaboration. You will mentor junior researchers, post-docs, and interns, and participate in recruiting and hiring activities. You will also be expected to interact with external partners of Wadhwani AI when required, and to make periodic visits to the communities from where challenges are derived and where the solutions will be deployed.

REQUIREMENTS

We are looking for ML Scientists with experience applying AI, machine learning, and data science to real-world computer vision problems. Ideal candidates should have a strong research background, have experience in mentoring junior researchers through strong code practices and ideation, and be adept at a variety of data mining/analysis methods and tools, building and implementing models, visualising data, creating/using algorithms, and running simulations. Familiarity with popular deep learning computer vision methods (RCNN, DETR, PointRend, Maskformer, etc.) is a strong plus, however demonstrated willingness and ability to learn will also be considered.

Candidates should be comfortable working with cross-functional teams and must have excellent oral and written communication skills and a track record of driving projects to completion. Evidence of written skills through high quality research publications is a plus.

Candidates should be passionate about using their technical skills to solve large societally important problems.