Generative AI & Innovation Lead (2-6 yrs)

Job Summary:

We are seeking an experienced and forward-thinking Generative AI & Innovation Lead to spearhead AI-driven innovation initiatives in the lending industry. This role will be critical in identifying, prototyping, and scaling generative AI solutions to drive efficiency, enhance customer experience, and business processes across the organization to achieve key business goals.

You will be responsible for understanding the evolving AI ecosystem, tracking industry trends and competition, crafting a roadmap for AI-driven transformation, and rapidly testing and scaling high-impact use cases.

Key Responsibilities:

- Strategic Innovation Leadership

- Accelerate business innovation by identifying, prototyping, and scaling generative AI and AI-powered solutions across the lending value chain.

- Build and own a strategic roadmap for GenAI initiatives aligned with business goals.

- Technology and Ecosystem Understanding

- Stay abreast of advancements in generative AI technologies (LLMs, multimodal models, agentic frameworks).

- Evaluate platforms like AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, Google Vertex AI, and open-source alternatives.

- Competitive & Market Analysis

- Analyze competitor strategies and benchmark industry best practices for AI adoption in lending and financial services.

- Identify market whitespace and unmet customer needs.

- Use Case Development & Experimentation

- Collaborate with business and tech stakeholders to source, prioritize, and evaluate use cases (e.g., loan origination automation, KYC, credit underwriting, fraud detection).

- Design and build rapid prototypes (POCs), validate with KPIs, and scale successful solutions into production.

- Agile & Cost-Conscious Execution

- Adopt a "fail fast" experimentation mindset with a strong focus on business impact and cost-efficiency.

- Promote lean innovation and drive adoption through internal evangelism.

- Cross-functional Collaboration

- Partner with data science, engineering, product, and compliance teams to ensure scalable, secure, and ethical deployment of AI solutions.

- Engage with legal and risk teams to align on model governance and regulatory considerations (e.g., model explainability, fairness).

Qualifications:

- Bachelor's or master's in computer science, Data Science, Engineering, or related field; MBA is a plus.

- 2+ years of experience in AI/ML, with at least 1 year hands-on with Generative AI applications.

- Proven experience driving innovation initiatives and AI solution development in financial services or lending.

- Understanding of lending lifecycle, underwriting, collections, risk models, and regulatory constraints.

- Experience with LLMs (e.g., Claude, GPT, Mistral, LLaMA), embedding models, prompt engineering, and vector databases.

- Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and orchestration tools (LangChain, Haystack, etc.).

- Excellent communication, leadership, and stakeholder management skills.

Preferred Skills:

- Experience working with synthetic data generation, document AI, conversational AI, or autonomous agents.

- Awareness of compliance, privacy, and ethical AI standards in financial services.

- Startup or intrapreneurial experience in launching new AI products or platforms.